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THE BURNING SECRET 


■# 


THE 

BURNING SECRET 


By 


STEPHEN BRANCH 

5 ^' 


Xn\ 




New York 

SCOTT AND SELTZER 
1919 



t 




Copyright, 1919, 

By Scott and Seltzer, Inc. 




V 


* 

i 



DEC 22 1919 



Printed in the United States of America 

All Rights Reserved 


©Cl. A 5 5 9 1 2 3 











CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Partner 9 

II Quick Friendship 21 

III The Trio 34 

IV The Attack 44 

V The Elephants 55 

VI Skirmishing 64 

VII The Burning Secret 75 

VIII Silent Hostility 86 

IX The Liars 99 

X On the Trail 114 

XI The Surprise Attack 127 

XII The Tempest 134 

XIII Dawning Perception 147 

XIV Darkness and Confusion .... 156 

XV The Last Dream ...... 164 



THE BURNING SECRET 














/ 














CHAPTER I 


THE PARTNER 

The train, with a shrill whistle, pulled into 
Summering. For a moment the black coaches 
stood still in the silvery light of the uplands to 
eject a few vivid human figures and to swallow 
up others. Exacerbated voices called back and 
forth; then, with a puffing and a chugging and 
another shrill shriek, the dark train clattered 
into the opening of the tunnel, and once more 
the landscape stretched before the view un- 
broken in all its wide expanse, the background 
swept clean by the moist wind. 

One of the arrivals, a young man pleasantly 
distinguished by his good dress and elastic 
walk, hurried ahead of the others and entered 
one of the hotel ’buses. The horses took the 


9 


The Burning Secret 

steep road leisurely. Spring was in the air. 
Up in the sky floated the white shifting clouds 
of May and June, light, sportive young crea- 
tures, playfully coursing the blue path of 
heaven, suddenly dipping and hiding behind 
the mountains, embracing and running away, 
crumpling up like handkerchiefs, elongating 
into gauzy scarfs, and ending their play by 
roguishly perching white caps on the moun- 
tain tops. There was unrest below, too, in the 
wind, which shook the lean trees, still wet from 
the rain, and set their limbs a-groaning softly 
and brought down a thousand shining drops. 
Sometimes a cool breath of snow descended 
from the mountains, and then there was a feel 
in the air both balmy and cutting. All things 
in the atmosphere and on the earth were in mo- 
tion and astir with the ferment of impatience. 
The horses tossed their heads and snorted as 
they now trotted down a descent, the sound of 
their bells jingling far ahead of them. 


io 


The Tartner 


On arriving at the hotel, the young man 
made straight for the registry and looked over 
the list of guests. He was disappointed. 

“What the deuce have I come here for?” he 
thought in vexation. “Stuck ’way up here on 
top of the mountain all alone, no company; 
why it’s worse than the office. I must have 
come either too early or too late. I never do 
have luck with my holidays. Not a single 
name do I know. If only there was a woman 
or two here to pick up a flirtation with, even a 
perfectly innocent one, if it must be, just to 
keep the week from being too utterly dismal.” 

The young man, a baron not very high up 
in the country’s nobility, held a government 
position, and had secured this short vacation 
not because he required it particularly, but be- 
cause his colleagues had all got a week off in 
spring and he saw no reason for making a pres- 
ent of his “week off” to the government. Al- 
though not without inner resources, he was a 


The Burning Secret 

thoroughly social being, his sociability being 
the very quality for which his friends liked 
him and for which he was welcomed in all 
circles. He was quite conscious of his inabil- 
ity to stay by himself and had no inclination 
to meet himself, as it were, but rather avoided 
his own company, feeling not the least urge to 
become intimately acquainted with his own 
soul. He knew he required contact with other 
human beings to kindle his talents and stir up 
the warmth and exuberance of his spirits. 
Alone he was like a match in a box, frosty and 
useless. 

He paced up and down the hall, completely 
out of sorts, stopping now and then irresolutely 
to turn the leaves of the magazines, or to 
glance at the newspapers, or to strike up a 
waltz on the piano in the music-room. Finally 
he sat down in a sulk and watched the grow- 
ing dusk and the gray mist steal in patches 
between the fir-trees. After a long, vain, 


The Fartner 

fretful hour he took refuge in the dining- 
room. 

As yet only a few of the tables were occu- 
pied. He took them in at a swift glance. No 
use. No one he knew, except — he responded 
to the greeting listlessly — a gentleman to whom 
he had spoken on the train, and farther off a 
familiar face from the metropolis. No one 
else. Not a single woman to promise even a 
momentary adventure. He became more and 
more impatient and out of sorts. 

Being a young man favored with a hand- 
some face, he was always prepared for a new 
experience. He was of the sort of men who 
are constantly on the lookout for an oppor- 
tunity to plunge into an adventure for the sake 
of its novelty, yet whom nothing surprises be- 
cause, forever lying in wait, they have calcu- 
lated every possibility in advance. Such men 
never overlook any element of the erotic. The 
very first glance they cast at a woman is a 
13 


The Burning Secret 

probe into the sensual, a searching, impartial 
probe that knows no distinction between the 
wife of a friend or the maid who opens the 
door to her house. One rarely realizes, in 
using the ready-made word “woman-hunter,” 
which we toss in contempt at such men, how 
true the expression is and how much of faith- 
ful observation it implies. In their watchful 
alertness all the passionate instincts of the 
chase are afire, the stalking, the excitement, 
the cruel cunning. They are always at their 
post, always ready and determined to follow 
the tracks of an adventure up to the very brink 
of the precipice, always loaded with passion, 
not with the passion of a lover, but with the 
cold, calculating, dangerous passion of a gam- 
bler. Some of them are doggedly persever- 
ing, their whole life shaping itself, from this 
expectancy, into one perpetual adventure. 
Each day is divided for them into a hundred 
little sensual experiences — a passing look, a 


The Partner 

flitting smile, an accidental contact of the 
knees — and each year into a hundred such 
days, in which the sensual experience consti- 
tutes the ever-flowing, life-giving and quick- 
ening source of their existence. 

There was no partner for a game here — 
that the baron’s experienced eye instantly de- 
tected. And there is nothing more exasperat- 
ing than for a player with cards in his hands, 
conscious of his ability, to be sitting at the 
green table vainly awaiting a partner. The 
baron called for a newspaper, but merely ran 
his eyes down the columns fretfully. His 
thoughts were crippled and he stumbled over 
the words. 

Suddenly he heard the rustling of a dress 
and a woman’s voice saying in a slightly vexed 
tone: 

“Mais tais toi done, Edgar.” Her accent 
was affected. 

A tall voluptuous figure in silk crackled by 
15 


The Burning Secret 

his table, followed by a small, pale boy in a 
black velvet suit. The boy eyed the baron 
curiously, as the two seated themselves at a 
table reserved for them opposite to him. 
The child was making evident efforts to be 
correct in his behavior, but propriety seemed 
to be out of keeping with the dark, restless 
expression of his eyes. 

The lady — the young man’s attention was 
fixed upon her only — was very much betoilet- 
ted and dressed with conspicuous elegance. 
She was a type that particularly appealed to 
the baron, a Jewess with a somewhat opulent 
figure, close to, though not yet arrived at, the 
borderline of overmaturity, and evidently of a 
passionate nature like his, yet sufficiently ex- 
perienced to hide her temperament behind a 
veil of dignified melancholy. He could not 
see her eyes, but was able to admire the lovely 
curve of her eyebrows arching clean and well- 
defined above a nose delicate yet nobly curved 
16 


The Partner 


and giving her face distinction. It was her 
nose that betrayed her race. Her hair, in 
keeping with everything else about her, was 
remarkably luxuriant. Her beauty seemed to 
have grown sated and boastful with the sure 
sense of the wealth of admiration it had 
evoked. 

She gave her order in a very low voice and 
told the boy to stop making a noise with his 
fork, this with apparent indifference to the 
baron’s cautious, stealthy gaze. She seemed 
not to observe his look, though, as a matter of 
fact, it was his keen, alert vigilance that had 
made her constrained. 

A flash lit up the gloom of the baron’s face. 
His nerves responded as to an underground 
current, his muscles tautened, his figure 
straightened up, fire came to his eyes. He 
was not unlike the women who require a mas- 
culine presence to bring out their full powers. 
He needed the stimulation of sex completely 
17 


The Burning Secret 

to energize his faculties. The hunter in him 
scented the prey. His eyes tried to challenge 
hers, and her glance crossed his, but waver- 
ingly without ever giving an occasional relax- 
ation of the muscles round her mouth, as if in 
an incipient smile, but he was not sure, and 
the very uncertainty of it aroused him. The 
one thing that held out promise was her con- 
stant looking away from him, which argued 
both resistance and embarrassment. Then, 
too, the conversation that she kept up with her 
child encouraged him, being obviously de- 
signed for show, while her outward calm, he 
felt, was forced and quite superficial, actually 
indicating the commencement of inner agita- 
tion. He was a-quiver. The play had begun. 

He made his dinner last a long while, and 
for a full half-hour, almost steadily, he kept 
the woman fixed with his gaze, until it had 
travelled over every line of her face and 
touched, unseen, every spot of her body. 

1 8 


The Tar trier 

Outside the darkness fell heavily, the woods 
groaned as if in childish fear of the large, 
rain-laden clouds stretching out gray hands 
after them. The shadows deepened in the 
room, and the silence seemed to press the 
people closer together. Under the dead weight 
of the stillness, the baron clearly noted that the 
mother’s conversation with her son became 
still more constrained and artificial and would 
soon, he was sure, cease altogether. 

He resolved upon an experiment. He rose 
and went to the door slowly, looking past the 
woman at the prospect outside. At the door 
he gave a quick turn, as if he had forgotten 
something, and caught her looking at him with 
keen interest. That titillated him. 

He waited in the hall. Presently she ap- 
peared, holding the boy’s hand and paused for 
a while to look through some magazines and 
show the child a few pictures. The baron 
walked up to the table with a casual air, pre- 
19 


The Burning Secret 

tending to hunt for a periodical. His real 
intention was to probe deeper below the moist 
sheen of her eyes and perhaps even begin a 
conversation. 

The woman instantly turned away and 
tapped the boy’s shoulder. 

“ Viens , Edgar . Au lit.” 

She rustled past the baron. He followed 
her with his eyes, somewhat disappointed. He 
had counted upon making the acquaintance 
that very evening. Her brusque manner was 
disconcerting. However, there was a fasci- 
nation in her resistance, and the very uncer- 
tainty added zest to the chase. At all events 
he had found a partner, and the play could 
begin. 


20 


CHAPTER II 


QUICK FRIENDSHIP 

The next morning, on entering the hall, the 
baron saw the son of the beautiful Unknown 
engaged in an eager conversation with the two 
elevator boys, to whom he was showing pic- 
tures in a book by Du Chaillu. His mother 
was not with him, probably not having come 
down from her room yet. 

The baron took his first good look at the 
boy. He seemed to be a shy, undeveloped, 
nervous little fellow, about twelve years old. 
His movements were jerky, his eyes dark and 
restless, and he made the impression, so often 
produced by children of his age, of being 
scared, as if he had just been roused out of 
sleep and placed in strange surroundings. His 


The Burning Secret 


face was not unbeautiful, but still quite un- 
decided. The struggle between childhood and 
young manhood seemed just about to be setting 
in. Everything in him so far was like dough 
that has been kneaded but not formed into a 
loaf. Nothing was expressed in clean lines, 
everything was blurred and unsettled. He was 
at that hobbledehoy age when clothes do not 
fit, and sleeves and trousers hang slouchily, 
and there is no vanity to prompt care of one’s 
appearance. 

The child made a rather pitiful impression 
as he wandered about the hotel aimlessly. He 
got in everybody’s way. He would plague the 
porter with questions and then be shoved 
aside, for he would stand in the doorway and 
obstruct the passage. Apparently there were 
no other children for him to play with, and 
in his child’s need for prattle he would try to 
attach himself to one or other of the hotel at- 
tendants. When they had time they would 
22 


Quick Friendship 

answer him, but the instant an adult came 
along they would stop talking and refuse to 
pay any more attention to him. 

It interested the baron to watch the child, 
and he looked on smiling as the unhappy little 
creature inspected everything and everybody 
curiously, while he himself was universally 
avoided as a nuisance. Once the baron inter- 
cepted one of his curious looks. His black 
eyes instantly fell, when he saw himself ob- 
served, and hid behind lowered lids. The 
baron was amused. The boy actualy began to 
interest him, and it flashed into his mind that 
he might be made to serve as the speediest 
means for bringing him and his mother to- 
gether. He could overcome his shyness, since 
it proceeded from nothing but fear. At any 
rate, it was worth the trial. So when Edgar 
strolled out of the door to pet, in his child’s 
need of tenderness, the pinkish nostrils of one 
of the ’bus horses, the baron followed him. 

23 


The Burning Secret 

Edgar was certainly unlucky. The driver 
chased him away rather roughly. Insulted 
and bored, he stood about aimlesly again, 
with a vacant, rather melancholy expression 
in his eyes. The baron now addressed him. 

“Well, young man, how do you like it 
here?” He attempted a tone of jovial ease. 

The child turned fairly purple and looked 
up in actual alarm, drawing his arms close to 
his body and twisting and turning in embar- 
rassment. For the first time in his life a 
stranger was the one to address him and not 
he the stranger. 

“Oh,” he managed to stammer out, choking 
over the last words, “thank you. I — I like it.” 

“You do? I’m surprised,” the baron 
laughed. “It’s a dull place, especially for a 
young man like you. What do you do 'with 
yourself all day long?” 

Edgar was still too confused to give a ready 
answer. Could it be true that this stranger, 
24 


Quick Friendship 

this elegant gentleman, was trying to pick up 
a conversation with him — with him, whom 
nobody had ever before cared a rap about? 
It made him both shy and proud. He pulled 
himself together with difficulty. 

“I read, and we do a lot of walking. Some- 
times we go out driving, mother and I. I 
am here to get well. I was sick. I must be 
out in the sunshine a lot, the doctor said.” 

Edgar spoke the last with greater assur- 
ance. Children are always proud of their ail- 
ments. The danger they are in makes them 
more important, they know, in the eyes of 
their elders. 

“Yes, the sun is good for you. It will tan 
your cheeks. But you oughtn’t to be standing 
round the whole day long. A fellow like you 
ought to be on the go, running, jumping, play- 
ing, full of spirits, and up to mischief, too. 
It strikes me you are too good. With that big 
fat book under your arm you look as though 

25 


The Burning Secret 


you were always poking in the house. By 
jingo, when I think of the kind of fellow I 
was at your age, I used to raise the devil, and 
every evening I came home with torn knicker- 
bockers. Don’t be so good, whatever you 
are.” 

Edgar could not help smiling, and the con- 
sciousness of his own smile removed his fear. 
Now he was anxious to say something in re- 
ply, but it seemed self-assertive and impudent 
to answer this affable stranger, who spoke to 
him in such a friendly way. He never had 
been forward and was easily abashed, so that 
now he was in the greatest embarrassment from 
sheer happiness and shame. He would have 
liked to continue the conversation, but noth- 
ing occurred to him. Luckily the great yel- 
low St. Bernard belonging to the hotel came 
up and sniffed at both of them and allowed 
himself to be petted. 

“Do you like dogs?” asked the baron. 

26 


Quick Friendship 

“Oh, very much. Grandma has one in her 
villa at Bains. When we stop there he stays 
with me the whole time. But that’s only in 
the summer when we go visiting.” 

“We have a lot of dogs at home on our es- 
tate, a full two dozen, I believe. If you be- 
have yourself here I’ll make you a present of 
one, brown with white ears, a pup still. 
Would you like to have it?” 

The child turned scarlet with joy. 

“I should say so.” 

The words fairly burst from his lips in an 
access of eagerness. Then he caught himself 
up and stammered in distress and as if fright- 
ened: 

“But mother won’t allow me to have a dog. 
She says she won’t keep a dog in the house. 
It’s too much of a nuisance.” 

The baron smiled. The conversation had 
at last come round to the mother. 

“Is your mother so strict?” 

27 


The Burning Secret 

The child pondered and looked up for an 
instant as if to find out whether the stranger 
was to be trusted on such slight acquaint- 
ance. 

“No,” he finally answered cautiously, “she’s 
not strict, and since I’ve been sick she lets me 
do anything I want. Maybe she’ll even let me 
keep a dog.” 

“Shall I ask her?” 

“Oh, yes, please do,” Edgar cried delight- 
edly. “If you do I’m sure she’ll give in. 
What does he look like? White ears, you 
said? Can he do any tricks yet?” 

“Yes, all sorts of tricks.” The baron had to 
smile at the sparkle of Edgar’s eyes. It had 
been so easy to kindle that light in them. 

All at once the child’s constraint dropped 
away, and all his emotionalism, kept in check 
till then by fear, bubbled over. In a flash the 
shy, intimidated child of a minute before 
turned into a boisterous lad. 

28 


Quick Friendship 

“If only his mother is transformed so 
quickly,” the baron thought. “If only she 
shows so much ardor behind her reserve.” 

Edgar went at him with a thousand ques- 
tions. 

“What’s the dog’s name?” 

“Caro.” 

“Caro!” he cried happily, somehow having 
to answer every word with a laugh of delight, 
so intoxicated was he with the unexpected- 
ness of having someone take him up as a 
friend. The baron, amazed at his own quick 
success, resolved to strike while the iron was 
hot, and invited the boy to take a walk with 
him. This put Edgar, who for weeks had 
been starving for company, into a fever of 
ecstasy. 

During the walk the baron questioned him, 
as if quite by the way, about a number of ap- 
parent trifles, and Edgar in response blurted 
out all the information he was seeking, telling 
29 


The Burning Secret 

him everything he wanted to know about the 
family. 

Edgar was the only son of a lawyer in the 
metropolis, who evidently came of a wealthy 
middle-class Jewish family. By clever, round- 
about inquiries the baron promptly elicited 
that Edgar’s mother had expressed herself as 
by no means delighted with her stay in Sum- 
mering and had complained of the lack of 
congenial company. He even felt he might 
infer from the evasive way in which Edgar 
answered his question as to whether his 
mother wasn’t very fond of his father that 
their marital relations were none of the hap- 
piest. He was almost ashamed at having been 
able to extract these family secrets from the 
unsuspecting child, for Edgar, very proud 
that anything he had to say could interest a 
grown-up person, fairly pressed confidences 
upon his new friend. His child’s heart beat 
with pride — the baron had put his arm on his 
30 


Quick Friendship 

shoulder while they were walking — to be seen 
in such close intimacy with a “man,” and 
gradually he forgot he was a child and talked 
quite unconstrainedly, as if to an equal. 

From his conversation it was quite clear 
that he was a bright boy, in fact, a bit too pre- 
cocious, as are most sickly children who spend 
much time with their elders, and his likes and 
dislikes were too marked. He took nothing 
calmly or indifferently. Every person or 
thing was discussed with either passionate en- 
thusiasm or a hatred so intense as to distort his 
face into a mean, ugly look. There was some- 
thing wild and jerky about his manner, accen- 
tuated perhaps by the illness he was just re- 
covering from, which gave his talk the fieri- 
ness of fanaticism. His awkwardness seemed 
to proceed from the painfully suppressed fear 
of his own passion. 

Before the end of half an hour the baron 
was already holding the boy’s throbbing heart 
31 


The Burning Secret 

in his hands. It is so infinitely easy to de- 
ceive children, those unsuspecting creatures 
whose love is so rarely courted. All the baron 
needed to do was to transport himself back to 
his own childhood, and the talk flowed quite 
naturally. Edgar felt himself in the presence 
of an equal, and within a few minutes had lost 
all sense of distance between them, and was 
perfectly at ease, conscious of nothing but 
bliss at having so unexpectedly found a friend 
in this lonely place. And what a friend! For- 
gotten were all his mates in the city where he 
lived, those little boys with their thin voices 
and inexperienced chatter. This one hour had 
almost expunged their faces. All his enthu- 
siasm and passion now belonged to this new, 
this big friend of his. 

On parting the baron invited him to take a 
walk with him again the next morning. Ed- 
gar’s heart expanded with pride. And, when 
from a little distance away the baron waved 
32 


Quick Friendship 

back to him like a real playmate, it was prob- 
ably the happiest moment in his life. It is so 
easy to deceive children. 

The baron smiled as he looked after the boy 
dashing away. The go-between had been won. 
Edgar, he knew, would bore his mother with 
stories of the wonderful baron and would re- 
peat every word he had said. At this he re- 
called complacently how cleverly he had 
woven in some compliments for the mother’s 
consumption. “Your beautiful mother,” he 
had always said. There was not the faintest 
shadow of doubt in his mind that the commu- 
nicative boy would never rest until he had 
brought him and his mother together. No 
need now to stir a finger in order to shorten 
the distance between himself and the lovely 
Unknown. He could dream away idly and 
feast his eyes on the landscape, for a child’s 
eager hands, he knew, were building the bridge 
for him to her heart. 


33 


CHAPTER III 


THE TRIO 

The plan, as appeared only an hour later, 
proved to be excellent. It worked without a 
hitch. The baron chose to be a little late in 
entering the dining-room, and when Edgar 
saw him, he jumped up from his seat and gave 
him an eager nod and a beatific smile, at the 
same time pulling his mother’s sleeve, saying 
something to her hastily, and pointing con- 
spicuously to the baron. 

His mother reproved him for his demon- 
strativeness. She blushed and showed genu- 
ine discomfort, but could not help yielding to 
the boy’s insistence and gave a glance across 
at the baron. This the baron instantly seized 
upon as the pretext for a deferential bow. 

The acquaintance was made. The lady had 
34 


The Trio 


to acknowledge his bow. Yet from now on 
she kept her head bent still lower over her 
plate and throughout the rest of the meal sedu- 
lously avoided looking over at the baron 
again. 

Not so Edgar. Every minute or two he 
turned his eyes on the baron, and once he even 
tried to speak to him across the two tables, an 
impropriety which his mother promptly 
checked with a severe rebuke. As soon as din- 
ner was over, Edgar was told he must go 
straight to bed, and an eager whispering be- 
gan between him and his mother, which re- 
sulted in a concession to the boy. He was al- 
lowed to go to the baron and say good-night 
to him. The baron said a few kind words and 
so set the child’s eyes ablaze again. 

Here the baron rose and in his adroit way, 
as if it were the most natural thing in the 
world, stepped over to the other table and con- 
gratulated his neighbor upon her bright, in- 
35 


The Burning Secret 


telligent son. He told her what a pleasant 
time he had spent with him that morning — 
Edgar beamed — and then inquired about the 
boy’s health. On this point he asked so many 
detailed questions that the mother was com- 
pelled to reply, and so was drawn irresistibly 
into a conversation. Edgar listened to it all in 
a sort of rapturous awe. 

The baron gave his name to the lady. The 
high sound of it, it seemed to him, made an 
impression on her. At any rate she lost her 
extreme reserve, though retaining perfect dig- 
nity. 

In a few minutes she took leave, on account 
of Edgar’s having to go to bed, as she said by 
way of a pretext. 

Edgar protested he was not sleepy and would 
be happy to stay up the whole night. But his 
mother remained obdurate and held out her 
hand by way of good-night to the baron, who 
shook hands with her most respectfully, 

36 


The Trio 

Edgar did not sleep well that night. A 
chaos of happiness and childish despair filled 
his soul. Something new had come to him 
that day. For the first time he had played a 
part in the life of adults. In his half-awake 
state he forgot that he was a child and all at 
once felt himself a grown man. Brought up 
an only child and often ailing, he had never 
had many friends. His parents, who paid 
little attention to him, and the servants had 
been the only ones to meet his craving for 
tenderness. 

The power of love is not properly gauged 
if it is estimated only by the object that in- 
spires it, if the tension preceding it is not 
taken into account — that gloomy space of dis- 
illusionment and loneliness which stretches in 
front of all the great events of the heart. 

In Edgar there had been a heavily fraught, 
unexpended emotion lying in wait, which now 
burst out and rushed to meet the first human 
37 


The Burning Secret 

being who seemed to deserve it. He lay in 
the dark, happy and dazed. He wanted to 
laugh, but had to cry. For he loved the baron 
as he had never loved friend, father, mother, 
or even God. All the immature passion of his 
ending boyhood wreathed itself about his 
mental vision of the man whose very name had 
been unknown to him a few hours before. 

He was wise enough not to be disturbed by 
the peculiar, unexpected way in which the new 
friendship had been formed. What troubled 
him was the sense of his own unworthiness 
and insignificance. “Am I fit company for 
him?” he plagued himself. “I, a little boy, 
twelve years old, who has to go to school still 
and am sent off to bed at night before anyone 
else? What can I mean to him, what have I 
to offer him?” 

The painful sense of his impotence to show 
his feelings in some way or other made him 
most unhappy. On other occasions, when he 
38 


The Trio 

had taken a liking for a boy, the first thing he 
had done was to offer to share his stamps and 
marbles and jacks. Now such childish pos- 
sessions, which only the day before had still 
had vast importance and charm in his eyes, had 
depreciated in value. They seemed silly. He 
disdained them. He couldn’t offer such things 
to his new friend. What possible way was 
there for him to express his feelings? The 
sense that he was small, only half a being, a 
mere child of twelve, grew upon him and tor- 
tured him more and more. Never before had 
he so vehemently cursed his childhood, or 
longed so heartily to wake up in the morning 
the person he had always dreamed of being, 
a man, big and strong, grown up like the 
others. 

His restless thoughts were mixed with the 
first bright dreams of the new world of man- 
hood. Finally he fell asleep with a smile on 
his lips, but his sleep was constantly broken 
39 


The Burning Secret 

by the anticipation of the next morning’s ap- 
pointment. At seven o’clock he awoke with a 
start, fearful that he was too late already. He 
dressed hastily and astonished his mother 
when he went in to say good-morning because 
she had always had difficulty getting him out 
of bed. Before she could question him he was 
out of her room again. 

With only the one thought in his mind, not 
to keep his friend waiting, he dawdled about 
downstairs in the hotel, even forgetting to eat 
breakfast. 

At half-past nine the baron came sauntering 
down the lobby with his easy air and no indi- 
cation that anything had been troubling him. 
He, of course, had completely forgotten the 
appointment for a walk, but he acted as though 
he were quite ready to keep his promise when 
the boy came rushing at him so eagerly. He 
took Edgar’s arm and paced up and down the 
lobby with him leisurely. Edgar was radi- 
40 


The Trio 


ant, although the baron gently but firmly re- 
fused to start on the walk at once. He seemed 
to be waiting for something. Every once in 
a while he gave a nervous glance at one of the 
various doors. Suddenly he drew himself up. 
Edgar’s mother had entered the hall. 

She responded to the baron’s greeting and 
came up to him with a pleasant expression on 
her face. Edgar had not told her about the 
walk. It was too precious a thing to talk 
about. But now the baron mentioned it and 
she smiled in approval. Then he went on to 
invite her to come along, and she was not slow 
in accepting. 

That made Edgar sulky. He gnawed at his 
lips. How provoking of his mother to have 
come into the lobby just then! The walk be- 
longed to him and him alone. To be sure, he 
had introduced his friend to his mother, but 
only out of courtesy. He had not meant to 
share him with anybody. Something like 
41 


The Burning Secret 

jealousy began to stir in him when he ob- 
served the baron’s friendliness to his mother. 

On the walk the dangerous sense the child 
had of his importance and sudden rise to 
prominence was heightened by the interest the 
two adults showed in him. He was almost 
the exclusive subject of their conversation. 
His mother expressed rather hypocritical 
solicitude on account of his pallor and nerv- 
ousness, while the baron kept saying it was 
nothing to worry about and extolled his young 
“friend’s” good manners and pleasant ways. 

It was the happiest hour of Edgar’s life. 
Rights were granted him that he had never 
before been allowed. He was permitted to 
take part in the conversation without a prompt 
“keep quiet, Edgar.” He could even express 
bold desires for which he would have been re- 
buked before. No wonder the deceptive feel- 
ing that he was grown up began to flourish in 
his imagination. In his bright dreams child- 
42 


The Trio 

hood already lay behind him like a suit he had 
outgrown and cast off. 

At the mother’s invitation, the baron took 
his midday meal at their table. She was grow- 
ing friendlier all the time. The vis-a-vis was 
now a companion, the acquaintanceship a 
friendship. The trio was in full swing, and 
the three voices, the woman’s, the man’s and 
the child’s, mingled in harmony. 


43 


CHAPTER IV 

THE ATTACK 

The impatient hunter felt the time had 
come to creep up on his game. The three- 
sidedness of the sport annoyed him, and so did 
the tone of it. To sit there and chat was rather 
pleasant, but he was after more than mere 
talk. Social intercourse, with the mask it puts 
over desire, always, he knew, retards the erotic 
between man and woman. Words lose their 
ardor, the attack its fire. Despite their con- 
versation together on indifferent matters, Ed- 
gar’s mother must never forget his real object, 
of which, he was quite convinced, she was al- 
ready aware. 

That his efforts to catch this woman were 


44 


The Attack 

not to prove in vain seemed very probable. 
She was at the critical age when a woman be- 
gins to regret having remained faithful to a 
husband she has never truly loved, and when 
the purple sunset of her beauty still affords 
her a final urgent choice between motherliness 
and womanliness. The life whose questions 
seem to have been answered long before be- 
comes a problem again, and for the last time 
the magnetic needle of the will wavers be- 
tween the hope for an intense love experience 
and ultimate resignation. The woman has a 
dangerous decision to confront, whether she 
will live her own life or that of her chilren, 
whether she will be a woman first, or a mother 
first. 

The baron, who was very perspicacious in 
these matters, thought that he discerned in Ed- 
gar’s mother this very vacillation between pas- 
sion to live her own life and readiness to sac- 
rifice her desires. In conversation she always 
45 


The Burning Secret 

omitted to mention her husband. Evidently he 
satisfied nothing but her bare external needs 
and not the snobbishness that an aristocratic 
way of living had excited in her. And as for 
her son, she knew precious little of the child’s 
soul. A shadow of boredom, wearing the veil 
of melancholy in her dark eyes, lay over her 
life and obscured her sensuousness. 

The baron resolved to act quickly, yet at 
the same time to avoid any appearance of 
haste. Like an angler, who tempts the fish 
by dangling and withdrawing the bait, he 
would affect a show of indifference and let 
himself be courted while he was the one that 
was actually doing the courting. He would 
put on an air of haughtiness and bring into 
sharp relief the difference in their social ranks. 
There was fascination in the idea of getting 
possession of that lovely, voluptuous creature 
simply by stressing his pride, by mere exter- 
nals, by the use of a high-sounding aristocratic 

46 


The Attack 


name and the adoption of a cold, proud man- 
ner. 

The chase was already growing hot. He 
had to be cautious and not show his excite- 
ment. So he remained in his room the whole 
afternoon, filled with the pleasant conscious- 
ness of being looked for and missed. But his 
absence was felt not so much by the woman, 
upon whom the effect was intended, as by 
Edgar. 

To the wretched child it was simple tor- 
ture. The whole afternoon he felt absolutely 
impotent and lost. With the obstinate faith- 
fulness of a boy he waited long, long hours 
for his friend. To have gone away or done 
anything by himself would have seemed like 
a crime against their friendship, and he loafed 
the time away in the hotel corridors, his heart 
growing heavier and heavier as each moment 
passed. After a while his heated imagination 
began to dwell on a possible accident or an 
47 


The Burning Secret 

insult he might unwittingly have offered his 
friend. He was on the verge of tears from 
impatience and anxiety. 

So that when the baron came in to dinner in 
the evening, he received a brilliant greeting. 
Edgar jumped up and, without paying any 
attention to his mother’s cry or rebuke or the 
astonishment of the other diners, rushed at the 
baron and threw his thin little arms about him. 

“Where have you been? Where have you 
been? We’ve been looking for you every- 
where.” 

The mother’s face reddened at hearing her- 
self included in the search. 

"Sots sage, Edgar . Assieds toi,” she said 
rather severely. She always spoke French to 
him, though it by no means came readily to 
her tongue, and if any but the simplest things 
were to be said she invariably floundered. 

Edgar obeyed and went back to his seat, but 
kept on questioning the baron. 

48 


The Attack 

“Edgar,” his mother interposed, “don’t for- 
get that the baron can do whatever he 
wants to do. Perhaps our company bores 
him.” 

Now she included herself, and the baron 
noted with satisfaction that the rebuke di- 
rected to the child was really an invitation for 
a compliment to herself. 

The hunter in him awakened. He was in- 
toxicated, thoroughly excited at having so 
quickly come upon the right tracks and at see- 
ing the game so close to the muzzle of his gun. 
His eyes sparkled, his blood shot through his 
veins. The words fairly bubbled from his lips 
with no conscious effort on his part. Like all 
men with pronouncedly erotic temperaments, 
he did twice as well, was twice himself when 
he knew a woman liked him, as some actors 
take fire when they feel that their auditors, 
the breathing mass of humanity in front of 
them, are completely under their spell. 

49 


The Burning Secret 

Naturally an excellent raconteur, with great 
skill in graphic description, he now surpassed 
himself. Besides, he drank several glasses of 
champagne, ordered in honor of the new 
friendship. He told of hunting big game in 
India, where he had gone at the invitation of 
an English nobleman. The theme was well 
chosen. The conversation had necessarily to 
be about indifferent matters, but this subject, 
the baron felt, would excite the woman as 
would anything exotic and unattainable by 
her. 

The one, however, upon whom the greater 
charm was exercised was Edgar. His eyes 
glowed with enthusiasm. He forgot to eat 
or drink and stared at the story-teller as if to 
snatch the words from his lips with his eyes. 
He had never expected actually to see a man 
who in his own person had experienced those 
tremendous things which he read about in his 
books — tiger hunts, brown men, Hindus, and 


The Attack 

the terrible Juggernaut, which crushed thou- 
sands of men under its wheels. Until then he 
had thought such men did not really exist and 
believed in them no more than in fairyland. 
A certain new and great feeling expanded his 
chest. He could not remove his eyes from his 
friend and stared with bated breath at the 
hands across the table that had actually killed 
a tiger. Scarcely did he dare to ask a ques- 
tion, and when he ventured to speak it was 
with a feverish tremor in his voice. His lively 
imagination drew the picture for each story. 
He saw his friend mounted high on an ele- 
phant caparisoned in purple, brown men to 
the right and to the left wearing rich turbans, 
and then suddenly the tiger leaping out of the 
jungle with gnashing teeth and burying its 
claws in the elephant’s trunk. 

Now the baron was telling about something 
even more interesting, how elephants were 
caught by a trick. Old, domesticated ele- 
5i 


The Burning Secret 

phants were used to lure the young, wild, high- 
spirited ones into the enclosure. The child’s 
eyes flashed. Then, as though a knife came 
cutting through the air right down between 
him and the baron, his mother said, glancing 
at the clock: 

“Neuf heures. Au lit ” 

Edgar turned white. To be sent to bed is 
dreadful enough to grown children at any 
time. It is the most patent humiliation in 
adult company, the proclamation that one is 
still a child, the stigma of being small and 
needing a child’s sleep. But how much more 
dreadful at so interesting a moment, when the 
chance of listening to such wonderful things 
would be lost. 

“Just this one story, mother, just this one 
story about the elephants.” 

He was about to plead, but bethought him- 
self quickly of his new dignity. He was a 
grown-up person. One attempt was all he 
52 


The Attack 

ventured. But that night his mother was pe- 
culiarly strict 

“No, it’s late already. Just go up. Sois 
sage, Edgar . I’ll tell you the story over again 
exactly the way the baron tells it to me.” 

Edgar lingered a moment. Usually his 
mother went upstairs with him. But he wasn’t 
going to beg her in front of his friend. His 
childish pride made him want to give his piti- 
ful withdrawal somewhat, at least, the ap- 
pearance of being voluntary. 

“Will you really? Everything? All about 
the elephants and everything else?” 

“Yes, Edgar, everything.” 

“To-night still?” 

“Yes, yes. But go on, go to bed now.” 

Edgar was amazed that he was able to shake 
hands with the baron and his mother without 
blushing. The sobs were already choking his 
throat. 

The baron ran his hand good-naturedly 
53 


The Burning Secret 

through his hair and pulled it down on his 
forehead. That brought a forced smile to the 
boy’s tense features. But the next instant he 
had to hurry to the door, or they would see 
the great tears well over his eyelids and trickle 
down his cheeks. 


54 


CHAPTER V 


THE ELEPHANTS 

Edgar's mother stayed at table with the 
baron a while longer. But the two no longer 
spoke of elephants or hunting. An indefinable 
embarrassment instantly sprang up between 
them, and a faint sultriness descended upon 
their conversation. After a time they went 
out into the hall and seated themselves in a 
corner. 

The baron was more brilliant than ever. 
The woman was a little heated by her two 
glasses of champagne, so that the conversation 
quickly took a dangerous turn. The baron 
55 


The Burning Secret 

was not what is called exactly handsome. He 
was simply young and had a manly look in his 
dark-brown, energetic, boyish face, and he 
charmed her with his fresh, almost ill-bred 
movements. She liked looking at him at such 
close range and was no longer afraid to en- 
counter his eyes. 

Gradually there crept into his language a 
boldness which vaguely disconcerted her. It 
was like a gripping of her body and then a 
letting go, an intangible sort of desire which 
sent the blood rushing to her face. The next 
moment, however, he would laugh again, an 
easy, unconstrained, boyish laugh, which made 
his little manifestations of desire seem like 
joking. Sometimes he said things she felt she 
ought to object to bluntly, but she was a natu- 
ral-born coquette, and his trifling audacities 
only provoked in her the taste for more. She 
was carried away by his bold gaze, and at 
length got so far as to try to imitate him, an- 
56 


The Elephants 

swering his looks with little fluttering promi- 
ses from her own eyes, and giving herself up 
to him in words and gestures. She permitted 
him to draw close to her, so that every now 
and then she felt the warm graze of his breath 
on her shoulders. 

Like all gamblers, the two forgot the pass- 
age of time and became so absorbed that they 
started in surprise when the lights in the hall 
were turned off at midnight. 

The woman jumped up in response to the 
first impulse of alarm she had felt. In the 
same moment she realized to what audacious 
lengths she had ventured. It was not the first 
time she had played with fire, but now her in- 
stincts, all aroused, told her the game had come 
perilously close to being in earnest. She shud- 
dered inwardly at discovering that she no 
longer felt quite secure, that something in her 
was slipping and gliding down into an abyss. 
Her head whirled with alarm, with slight in- 
57 


The Burning Secret 

toxication from the champagne, and with the 
ring of the baron’s ardent language in her ears. 
A dull dread came over her. She had experi- 
enced the same sort of dread several times 
before in similar dangerous moments, but it 
had never so overpowered her. This extreme 
dizziness was something she had never before 
experienced. 

“Good-night,” she said hastily. “See you 
in the morning again.” 

She felt like running away, not so much 
from him as from the danger of the moment 
and from an odd, novel insecurity she felt 
within herself. 

But the baron held her hand in a tight but 
gentle grip and kissed it four or five times 
from the delicate tips of her fingers to her 
wrist. A little shiver went through her at the 
graze of his rough mustache on the back of 
her hand, and her blood ran warm and 
mounted to her head. Her cheeks glowed. 

58 


The Elephants 

There was a hammering at her temples. A 
wild unreasoning fear made her snatch her 
hand away. 

“Don’t go, don’t go,” the baron pleaded in 
a whisper. But she was already gone, the 
awkwardness of her haste revealing plainly 
her fright and confusion. She was undergo- 
ing the excitement that the baron wanted. She 
was all confused, one moment in awful dread 
that the nlan behind might follow and put his 
arms round her, and the next instant regret- 
ting that he had not done so. In those few 
seconds the thing might have taken place that 
she had been dreaming of for years, the great 
adventure. She had always taken voluptuous 
delight in creeping up to the very edge of an 
adventure and then jumping back at the last 
moment, an adventure of the great and danger- 
ous kind, not a mere fleeting flirtation. But 
the baron was too proud to push his advan- 
tage now, too assured of his victory to take 
59 


The Burning Secret 

this woman like a robber in a moment of weak- 
ness and intoxication. A fair sportsman pre- 
fers his game to show fight and to surrender 
quite consciously. The woman could not es- 
cape him. The virus, he knew, was already 
seething in her veins. 

She stopped on the landing above and 
pressed her hand to her throbbing heart. She 
had to rest a while. Her nerves were snap- 
ping. She heaved a great sigh, partly of re- 
lief at having escaped a danger, partly of re- 
gret. Her emotions were mixed, and all she 
was vividly conscious of was the whirl of her 
blood and a faint giddiness. With half-closed 
eyes she groped her way like a drunken woman 
to the door and breathed with relief when she 
felt the cool door-knob in her hand. At last 
she was safe. 

She opened the door softly and the next sec- 
ond started back in fright. Something had 
moved way back in the dark. In her excited 
60 


The Elephants 

state this was too much, and she was about to 
cry for help when a very, very sleepy voice 
came from within, saying: 

“Is that you, mother?” 

“Goodness gracious! What are you doing 
here?” 

She rushed to the sofa where Edgar was 
lying curled up trying to keep himself wide 
awake. She thought the child must be ill and 
needed attention. 

“I waited for you so long, and then I fell 
asleep.” 

“What were you waiting for?” 

“You know. To hear about the elephants.” 

“Elephants?” As she asked the question 
Edgar’s mother remembered her promise. 
She was to tell him all about the elephant 
hunts and the baron’s other adventures that 
very night. And so the simple child had 
crept into her room and in unquestioning 
faith had waited for her until he had dropped 
61 


The Burning Secret 

asleep. The absurdity of it enraged her, or 
rather she was angry with herself, and for 
that reason she wanted to outshriek the tiny 
whisper of her conscience telling her she had 
done a shameful wrong. 

“Go to bed at once, you nuisance !” she 
cried. 

Edgar stared at her. Why was she so an- 
gry? He hadn’t done anything wrong. But 
his very amazement only made her angrier. 

“Go to bed at once,” she shouted, in a rage, 
because she felt how unjust she was to the 
child. 

Edgar went without a word. He was dread- 
fully sleepy and felt only in a blur that his 
mother had not kept her promise and that 
somehow or other he was being treated mean- 
ly. Yet he did not rebel. His susceptibilities 
were dulled by sleepiness. Besides, he was 
angry with himself for having fallen asleep 
while waiting. 


62 


The Elephants 

“Like a baby,” he said to himself in disgust 
before dropping off to sleep again. 

Since the day before he hated himself for 
being still a child. 


63 


CHAPTER VI 


SKIRMISHING 

The baron had passed a bad night. It is 
rather vain to attempt to sleep after an ad- 
venture that has been abruptly broken off. 
Tossing on his bed and starting up out of op- 
pressive dreams, the baron was soon regretting 
that he had not seized the moment. The next 
morning when he came down he was still 
sleepy and cross and in no mood to take up 
with Edgar, who at sight of him rushed out 
of a corner and threw his arms about his waist 
and began to pester him with a thousand ques- 
tions. The boy was happy to have his big 
friend to himself once more without having 
to share him with his mother. He implored 
him not to tell his stories to her, but only to 
himself. In spite of her promise she had not 

64 


Skirmishing 

recounted all those wonderful things she had 
said she would. Edgar assailed the baron with 
a hundred childish importunities and stormy 
demonstrations of love. He was so happy at 
last to have found him again and to be alone 
with him. He had been waiting for him since 
early in the morning. 

The baron gave the child rough answers. 
That eternal lying in wait, those silly ques- 
tions — in short, the boy’s unsolicited passion — 
began to annoy him. He was tired of going 
about all day long with a puppy of twelve, 
talking nonsense. All he cared for now was 
to strike while the iron was hot and get the 
mother by herself, the very thing it was diffi- 
cult to do with this child forever inflicting his 
presence. For the first time the baron cursed 
his incautiousness in having inspired so much 
affection, for he saw no chance, on this occa- 
sion at least, to rid himself of his too, too de- 
voted friend. 


65 


The Burning Secret 

At any rate it was worth the trial. The 
baron waited until ten o’clock, the time Ed- 
gar’s mother had agreed to go out walking 
with him. He sat beside the boy, paying no 
attention to his chatter and even glancing 
through the paper, though every now and then 
tossing the child a crumb of talk so as not to 
insult him. When the hour hand was at ten 
and the minute hand was just reaching twelve, 
he asked Edgar, as though suddenly remem- 
bering something, to do him a favor and run 
across to the next hotel and find out if his 
cousin, Count Rosny, had arrived. Delighted 
at last to be of service to his friend, the unsus- 
pecting child ran off as fast as his legs would 
carry him, careering down the road so madly 
that people looked after him in wonder. 

Count Rosny, the clerk told him, had not ar- 
rived, nor had he even announced his coming. 
Edgar again made post haste back to bring 
this information to his friend. But where 
66 


Skirmishing 

was his friend? Nowhere in the hall. Up in 
his room perhaps. Edgar dashed up the stairs 
and knocked at his door. No answer. He 
ran down again and searched in the music- 
room, the cafe, the verandas, the smoking 
room. In vain. He hurried to his mother’s 
room to see if she knew anything about the 
baron. But she was gone, too. When finally, 
in his despair, he applied to the porter, he was 
told the two had gone out together a few 
minutes before. 

Edgar waited for their return patiently. He 
was altogether unsuspecting and felt quite 
sure that they would come back soon because 
the baron wanted to hear whether or not his 
cousin had arrived. However, long stretches 
of time went by, and gradually uneasiness 
crept upon him. Ever since the moment when 
that strange, seductive man had entered his 
little life, never as yet tinged by suspicion, the 
child had spent his days in one continual state 
67 


The Turning Secret 

of tension and tremulousness and confusion. 
Upon such delicate organisms as those of chil- 
dren every emotion impresses itself as upon 
soft wax. Edgar’s eyelids began to twitch 
again, and he was already a shade or two 
paler. 

He waited and waited, patiently, at first, 
then in wild excitement, on the verge of tears. 
Yet no suspicion crept into his child’s soul. So 
blindly trustful was he of his wonderful friend 
that he fancied there must have been some 
misunderstanding, and he tortured himself 
fearing he had not executed his commission 
properly. 

But, when they came home at last, how odd 
that they lingered at the threshold talking 
gaily without showing the faintest surprise 
and without, apparently, having missed him 
very much. 

“We went out expecting to meet you, Ed- 
die,” said the baron, forgetting to ask if the 
68 


Skirmishing 

count had arrived. When Edgar, in conster- 
nation that they must have been looking for 
him on the way between the two hotels, ea- 
gerly asseverated that he had taken the straight 
road and questioned them about the direction 
they had gone, his mother cut him off short 
with, “All right, Edgar, all right. Children 
must be seen and not heard.” 

There, this was the second time, Edgar 
thought, flushing with anger, that his mother 
had so horridly tried to make him look small 
in front of his friend. Why did she do it? 
Why did she always want to set him down as 
a child when, he was convinced, he was no 
longer a child? Evidently she was jealous of 
his friend and was planning to get him all to 
herself. Yes, that was it, and it was she who 
had purposely led the baron the wrong way. 
But he wouldn’t let her treat him like that 
again, he’d show her. He was going to be 
spiteful, he wasn’t going to say a word to her 
69 


The Burning Secret 

at table, and he would speak only to his friend. 

However, it was not so easy to keep quiet 
as he thought it would be. Things went in a 
most unanticipated way. Neither his mother 
nor the baron noticed his attitude of spiteful- 
ness. Why, they did not even pay the slightest 
attention to him, who, the day before, had 
been the medium of their coming together. 
They talked over his head and laughed and 
joked as though he had disappeared under 
the table. His blood mounted to his head 
and a lump came into his throat. A horrid 
sense of his impotence overwhelmed him. 
Was it his doom to sit there quietly and look 
on while his mother stole away from him his 
friend, the one man he loved, while he, Edgar, 
made no movement in self-defence and used 
no other weapon than silence? He felt as 
though he must get up and pound the table 
with his clenched fists, just to make them take 
notice of him. But he restrained himself and 
70 


Skirmishing 

merely put down his knife and fork and 
stopped eating. Even this it was a long time 
before they observed. It was not until the last 
course that his mother became conscious that 
he had not tasted his food and asked him if he 
were not feeling well. 

“Disgusting,” he thought. “That’s all she 
ever thinks of, whether I’m sick or not. Noth- 
ing else about me seems to matter to her.” 

He told her shortly that he wasn’t hungry, 
which quite satisfied her. Nothing, absolutely 
nothing forced them to pay attention to him. 
The baron seemed to have forgotten him com- 
pletely, at least he never addressed a single 
remark to him. His eyeballs were getting 
hot with suppressed tears, and finally he had 
to resort to the childlike device of raising his 
napkin like a screen to hide the traitorous 
drops that rolled down his cheeks and salted 
his lips. When the meal finally came to an 
end, he drew a sigh of relief. 

71 


The Burning Secret 

During the meal his mother had proposed 
a drive to an interesting spot in the neighbor- 
hood and Edgar had listened with his lips be- 
tween his teeth. So she was not going to al- 
low him a single moment alone with his friend 
any more. But now, as they got up from table, 
came something even worse, and Edgar’s an- 
ger went over into a fury of hate. 

“Edgar,” said his mother, “you’ll be for- 
getting everything you learned at school. You 
had better stay here this afternoon while we’re 
out driving and do a little studying.” 

He clenched his small fists again. There 
she was at it again, humiliating him in front 
of fiis friend, publicly reminding him that he 
was still a child who had to go to school and 
whose presence was merely tolerated by his 
elders. This time, however, her intentions 
were altogether too obvious, and Edgar was 
satisfied to turn away without replying. 

“Insulted again,” she said, smiling, and then 
72 


Skirmishing 

to the baron, “Do you really think it’s so bad 
for him to spend an hour studying once in a 
while?” 

To this — something in the child’s heart con- 
gealed — to this the baron, who called himself 
his friend and who had made fun of him for 
being a bookworm, made answer that an hour 
or two really couldn’t do any harm. 

Was there an agreement between the two? 
Had they actually allied themselves against 
him? 

“My father,” said the boy, his eyes flashing 
anger, “forbade my studying here. He wants 
me to get my health back here.” Edgar 
hurled this out with all his pride in his illness, 
clinging desperately to his father’s dictum and 
his father’s authority. It came out like a 
threat, and to his immense astonishment it 
took effect, seeming actually to have made 
both of them uncomfortable, his mother es- 
pecially, for she turned her eyes aside and 
73 


The Burning Secret 

began to drum on the table nervously with her 
fingers. For a while there was a painful si- 
lence, broken finally by the baron, who said 
with a forced laugh: 

“It’s just as you say, Eddie. I myself don’t 
have to take examinations any more. I failed 
in all my examinations long ago.” 

Edgar gave no smile, but looked at the 
baron with a yearning, searching gaze, as if to 
probe to the innermost of his being. What 
was taking place in the baron’s soul? Some- 
thing between him and Edgar had changed, 
and the child knew not what or why. His 
eyes wandered unsteadily, in his heart went a 
little rapid hammer, his first suspicion. 


74 


CHAPTER VII 


THE BURNING SECRET 

“What has made them so different?” the 
child pondered while sitting opposite them in 
the carriage. “Why don’t they behave toward 
me as they did at first? Why does mamma 
avoid my eyes when I look at her? Why does 
he always try to joke when I’m around and 
make a silly of himself? They don’t talk to 
me as they did yesterday or the day before 
yesterday. Their faces even seem different. 
Mamma’s lips are so red she must have rouged 
them. I never saw her do that before. And 
he keeps frowning as though he were offend- 
ed. Could I have said anything to annoy 
them? No, I haven’t said a word. It cannot 
be on my account that they’re so changed. 

75 


The Burning Secret 

Even their manner toward each other is not 
the same as it was. They behave as though 
they had been naughty and didn’t dare con- 
fess. They don’t chat the way they did yester- 
day, nor laugh. They’re embarrassed, they’re 
concealing something. They’ve got a secret 
between them that they don’t want to tell me. 
I’m going to find it out. I must, I don’t care 
what happens, I must. I believe I know what 
it is. It must be the same thing that grown- 
up people always shut me out from when they 
talk about it. It’s what books speak of, and it 
comes in operas when the men and women on 
the stage stand singing face to face with their 
arms spread out, and embrace, and shove each 
other away. It must have something to do 
with my French governess, who behaved so 
badly with papa and was dismissed. All these 
things are connected. I feel they are, but I 
don’t know how. Oh, to find it out, at last to 
find it out, that secret! To possess the key that 
76 


The Burning Secret 

opens all doors! Not to be a child any longer 
with everything kept hidden from one and al- 
ways being held off and deceived. Now or 
never! I will tear it from them, that dread- 
ful secret !” 

A deep furrow cut itself between the child’s 
brows. He looked almost old as he sat in the 
carriage painfully cogitating this great mys- 
tery and never casting a single glance at the 
landscape, which was shading into all the deli- 
cate colors of the spring, the mountains in the 
freshened green of their pines, the valleys in 
the mistier greens of budding trees, shrubbery 
and young grass. All he had eyes for were 
the man and the woman on the seat opposite 
him, as though, with his hot gaze, as with an 
angling hook, he could snatch the secret from 
the shimmering depths of their eyes. 

Nothing gives so keen an edge to the intelli- 
gence as a passionate suspicion. All the pos- 
sibilities of an immature mind are developed 
77 


The Burning Secret 

by a trail leading into obscurity. Sometimes 
it is only a single light door that keeps chil- 
dren out of the world that we call the real 
world, and a chance puff of wind may blow 
it open. 

Edgar, all at once, felt himself tangibly 
closer, closer than ever before, to the Un- 
known, the Great Secret. It was right next 
to him, still veiled and unriddled, but very 
near. It excited him, and it was this that lent 
him his sudden solemnity. Unconsciously he 
sensed that he was approaching the outer edges 
of childhood. 

The baron and Edgar’s mother were both 
sensible of a dumb opposition in front of them 
without realizing that it emanated from the 
child. The presence of a third person in the 
carriage constrained them, and those two dark 
glowing orbs opposite acted as a check. They 
scarcely dared to speak or look up, and it was 
impossible for them to drop back into the 
78 


The Burning Secret 

light, easy conversational tone of the day be- 
fore, so entangled were they already in ardent 
confidences and words suggestive of secret ca- 
resses. They would start a subject, promptly 
come to a halt, say a broken phrase or two, 
make another attempt, then lapse again into 
complete silence. Everything they said seemed 
always to stumble over the child’s obstinate 
silence and fall flat. 

The mother was especially oppressed by her 
son’s sullen quiescence. Giving him a cau- 
tious glance out of the corners of her eyes, she 
was startled to observe, for the first time, in 
the manner Edgar compressed his lips, a re- 
semblance to her husband when he was an- 
noyed. At that particular moment, when she 
was playing “hide-and-seek” with an adven- 
ture, it was more than ordinarily discomfiting 
to be reminded of her husband. The boy, only 
a foot or two away, with his dark, restless eyes 
and that suggestion behind his pale forehead 
79 


The Burning Secret 

of lying in wait, seemed to her like a ghost, a 
guardian of her conscience, doubly intolerable 
there in the close quarters of the carriage. 
Suddenly, for one second, Edgar looked up 
and met his mother’s gaze. Instantly they 
dropped their eyes in the consciousness that 
they were spying on each other. Till then 
each had had implicit faith in the other. Now 
something had come between mother and child 
and made a difference. For the first time in 
their lives they set to observing each other, to 
separating their destinies, with secret hate al- 
ready mounting in their hearts, though the 
feeling was too young for either to admit it to 
himself. 

When the horses pulled up at the hotel en- 
trance, all three were relieved. The excur- 
sion had been a failure, each of them felt, 
though thy did not say so. Edgar was the 
first to get out of the carriage. His mother 
excused herself for going straight up to her 
So 


The Burning Secret 


room, pleading a headache. She was tired 
and wanted to be by herself. Edgar and the 
baron were left alone together. 

The baron paid the coachman, looked at 
his watch, and mounted the steps to the hall, 
paying no attention to Edgar and passed him 
with that easy sway of his slim back which 
had so enchanted the child that he had imme- 
diately begun to imitate the baron’s walk. The 
baron brushed past him, right past him. Evi- 
dently he had forgotten him and left him to 
stand there beside the driver and the horses as 
though he did not belong to him. 

Something in Edgar broke in two as the 
man, whom in spite of everything he still idol- 
ized, slighted him like that. A bitter despair 
filled his heart when the baron left with- 
out so much as touching him with his cloak 
or saying a single word, when he, Edgar, was 
conscious of having done no wrong. His pain- 
fully enforced self-restraint gave way, the too 
81 


The Burning Secret 

heavy burden of dignity that he had imposed 
upon himself dropped from his narrow little 
shoulders, and he became the child again, 
small and humble, as he had been the day 
before. At the top of the steps he confronted 
the baron and said in a strained voice, thick 
with suppressed tears: 

“What have I done to you that you don’t 
notice me any more? Why are you always 
like this with me now? And mamma, too? 
Why are you always sending me off? Am 
I a nuisance to you, or have I done anything 
to offend you?” 

The baron was startled. There was some- 
thing in the child’s voice that upset him at 
first, then stirred him to tenderness and sym- 
pathy for the unsuspecting boy. 

“You’re a goose, Eddie. I’m merely out of 
sorts to-day. You’re a dear boy, and I really 
love you.” He tousled Edgar’s hair, yet with 
averted face so as not to be obliged to see those 

82 


The Burning Secret 

great moist, beseeching child’s eyes. The 
comedy he was playing was becoming pain- 
ful. He was beginning to be ashamed of hav- 
ing trifled so insolently with the child’s love. 
That small voice, quivering with suppressed 
sobs, cut him to the quick. “Go upstairs now, 
Eddie. We’ll get along together this evening 
just as nicely as ever, you’ll see.” 

“You won’t let mamma send me right off to 
bed, will you?” 

“No, no, I won’t, Eddie,” the baron smiled. 
“Just go on up. I must dress for dinner.” 

Edgar went, made happy for the moment. 
Soon, however, the hammer began to knock 
at his heart again. He was years older since 
the day before. A strange guest, Distrust, had 
lodged itself in his child’s breast. 

He waited for the decisive test, at table. 
Nine o’clock came, and his mother had not 
yet said a word about his going to bed. Why 
did she let him stay on just that day of all days, 
83 


The Burning Secret 


she who was usually so exact? It bothered 
him. Had the baron told her what he had 
said! He was consumed with regret, sud- 
denly, that he had run after the baron so 
trustingly. At ten o’clock his mother rose 
and took leave of the baron, who, oddly, 
showed no surprise at her early departure and 
made no attempt to detain her as he usually 
did. The hammer beat harder and harder at 
Edgar’s breast. 

Now he must apply the test with exceeding 
care. He, too, behaved as though he suspected 
nothing and followed his mother to the door. 
Actually, in that second, he caught a smiling 
glance that travelled over his head straight to 
the baron and seemed to indicate a mutual un- 
derstanding, a secret held in common. So the 
baron had betrayed him! That was why his 
mother had left so early. He, Edgar, was to 
be lulled with a sense of security so that he 
would not get in their way the next day. 

84 


The Burning Secret 

“Mean!” he murmured. 

“What’s that?” his mother asked. 
“Nothing,” he muttered between clenched 
teeth. 

He, too, had his secret. His secret was 
hate, a great hate for the two of them. 


85 


CHAPTER VIII 


SILENT HOSTILITY 

The tumult of Edgar’s conflicting emotions 
subsided into one smooth, clear feeling of hate 
and open hostility, concentrated and unadul- 
terated. Now that he was certain of being in 
their way, the imposition of his presence upon 
them gave him a voluptuous satisfaction. Al- 
ways accompanying them with the compressed 
strength of his enmity, he would goad them 
into madness. He gloated over the thought. 
The first to whom he showed his teeth was the 
baron, when he came downstairs in the morn- 
ing and said “Hello, Edgar!” with genuine 
heartiness in his voice. Edgar remained sit- 
ting in the easy chair and answered curtly with 
a hard “G’d morning.” 

86 


Silent Hostility 

“Your mother down yet?” 

Edgar kept his eyes glued to his newspaper. 

“I don’t know.” 

The baron was puzzled. 

“Slept badly, Eddie?” The baron was 
counting on a joke to help him over the situ- 
ation again, but Edgar merely tossed out a 
contemptuous “No” and continued to study 
the paper. 

“Stupid,” the baron murmured, shrugging 
his shoulders and walked away. Hostilities 
had been declared. 

Toward his mother Edgar’s manner was 
cool and polite. When she made an awkward 
attempt to send him off to the tennis-court, he 
gave her a quiet rebuff, and his smile and the 
bitter curl at the corners of his mouth showed 
that he was no longer to be fooled. 

“I’d rather go walking with you, mamma,” 
he said with assumed friendliness, looking 
her straight in the eyes. His answer was ob- 
87 


The Burning Secret 

viously not to her taste. She hesitated and 
seemed to be looking for something. 

“Wait for me here,” she decided at length 
and went into the dining-room for breakfast. 

Edgar waited, but his distrust was lively, 
and his instincts, all astir, extracted a secret 
hostile intent from everything the baron and 
his mother now said. Suspicion was begin- 
ning to give him remarkable perspicacity 
sometimes. Instead, therefore, of waiting in 
the hall, as he had been bidden, he went out- 
side to a spot from which he commanded a 
view not only of the main entrance but of all 
the exits from the hotel. Something in him 
scented deception. He hid himself behind a 
pile of wood, as the Indians do in the books, 
and when, about half an hour later, he saw his 
mother actually coming out of a side door 
carrying a bunch of exquisite roses and fol- 
lowed by the baron, the traitor, he laughed in 
glee. They seemed to be gay and full of 
88 


Silent Hostility 

spirits. Were they feeling relieved at having 
escaped him to be alone with their secret? 
They laughed as they talked, and turned into 
the road leading to the woods. 

The moment had come. Edgar, as though 
mere chance had brought him that way, 
strolled out from behind the woodpile and 
^alked to meet them, with the utmost com- 
posure, allowing himself ample time to feast 
upon their surprise. When they caught sight 
of him they were quite taken aback, he saw, 
and exchanged a glance of astonishment. The 
child advanced slowly, with an assumed non- 
chalant air, never removing his mocking gaze 
from their faces. 

“Oh, here you are, Eddie. We were look- 
ing for you inside,” his mother said finally. 

“The shameless liar!” the child thought, but 
held his lips set hard, keeping back the secret 
of his hate. The three stood there irresolutely, 
one watchful of the others. 

89 


The Burning Secret 


“Well, let’s go on,” said the woman, an- 
noyed, but resigned, and plucked one of the 
lovely roses to bite. Her nostrils were quiv- 
ering, a sign in her of extreme anger. Edgar 
stood still, as though it were a matter of indif- 
ference to him whether they walked on or not, 
looked up at the sky, waited for them to start, 
then followed leisurely. The baron made one 
more attempt. 

“There’s a tennis tournament to-day. Have 
you ever seen one?” 

The baron was not worth an answer any 
more. Edgar merely gave him a scornful 
look and pursed his lips for whistling. That 
was his full reply. His hate showed its bared 
teeth. 

Edgar’s unwished-for presence weighed 
upon the two like a nightmare. They felt 
very like convicts who follow their keeper 
gritting their teeth and clenching their fists in 
secret. Edgar neither did nor said anything 
90 


Silent Hostility 

out of the way, yet he became, every moment, 
more unbearable to them, with his watchful 
glances out of great moist eyes and his dogged 
sullenness which was like a prolonged growl 
at any attempt they made at an advance. 

“Go on ahead of us,” his mother suddenly 
snapped, made altogether ill at ease by his in- 
tent listening to everything she and the baron 
were saying. “Don’t be hopping right at my 
toes. It makes me fidgety.” 

Edgar obeyed. But at every few steps he 
would face about and stand still, waiting for 
them to catch up if they had lingered behind, 
letting his gaze travel over them diabolically 
and enmeshing them in a fiery net of hate, in 
which, they felt, they were being inextricably 
entangled. His malevolent silence corroded 
their good spirits like an acid, his gaze dashed 
extinguishing gall on their conversation. The 
baron made no other attempts to court the 
woman beside him, feeling, infuriatedly, that 
91 


The Burning Secret 

she was slipping away from him because her 
fear of that annoying, obnoxious child was 
cooling the passion he had fanned into a flame 
with so much difficulty. After repeated un- 
successful attempts at a conversation they 
jogged along the path in complete silence, 
hearing nothing but the rustling of the leaves 
and their own dejected footsteps. 

There was active hostility now in each of 
the three. The betrayed child perceived with 
satisfaction how their anger gathered helpless- 
ly against his own little, despised person. 
Every now and then he cast a shrewd, ironic 
look at the baron’s sullen face and saw how he 
was muttering curses between gritted teeth and 
had to restrain himself from hurling them out 
at him. He also observed with sarcastic glee 
how his mother’s fury was mounting and that 
both of them were longing for an opportunity 
to attack him and send him away, or render 
him innocuous. But he gave them no open- 
92 


Silent Hostility 


ing, the tactics of his hate had been prepared 
too well in advance and left no spots exposed. 

“Let us go back,” his mother burst out, feel- 
ing she could no longer control herself and 
that she must do something, if only cry out, 
under the imposition of this torture. 

“A pity,” said Edgar quietly, “it’s so 
lovely.” 

The other two realized the child was mak- 
ing fun of them, but they dared not retort, 
their tyrant having learned marvellously in 
two days the supreme art of self-control. Not 
a quiver in his face betrayed his mordant 
irony. Without another word being spoken 
they retraced the long way back to the hotel. 

When Edgar and his mother were alone to- 
gether in her room, her excitement was still 
seething. She tossed her gloves and parasol 
down angrily. Edgar did not fail to note these 
signs and was aware that her electrified nerves 
would seek to discharge themselves, but he 
93 


The Burning Secret 

courted an outburst and remained in her room 
on purpose. She paced up and down, seated 
herself, drummed on the table with her fin- 
gers, and jumped up again. 

“How untidy you look. You go around 
filthy. It’s a disgrace. Aren’t you ashamed 
of yourself — a boy of your age!” 

Without a word of opposition Edgar went 
to his mother’s toilet table and washed and 
combed himself. His cold, obdurate silence 
and the ironic quiver of his lips drove her to 
a frenzy. Nothing would have satisfied her 
so much as to give him a sound beating. 

“Go to your room,” she screamed, unable 
to endure his presence a second longer. Ed- 
gar smiled and left the room. 

How the two trembled before him! How 
they dreaded every moment in his presence, 
the merciless grip of his eyes! The worse 
they felt the more he gloated, and the more 
challenging became his satisfaction. Edgar 
94 


Silent Hostility 

tortured the two defenceless creatures with 
the almost animal cruelty of children. The 
baron, because he had not given up hope of 
playing a trick on the lad and was thinking 
of nothing but the goal of his desires, could 
still contain his anger, but Edgar’s mother was 
losing her hold upon herself and kept con- 
stantly slipping. It was a relief to her to be 
able to shriek at him. 

“Don’t play with your fork,” she cried at 
table. “You’re an ill-bred monkey. You 
don’t deserve to be in the company of grown- 
up people.” 

Edgar smiled, with his head tipped a trifle 
to one side. He knew his mother’s outburst 
was a sign of desperation and took pride in 
having made her betray herself. His manner 
and glance were now as composed as a physi- 
cian’s. In previous days he might have an- 
swered back rudely so as to annoy her. But 
hate teaches many things, and quickly. How 


The Burning Secret 

he kept quiet, and still kept quiet, and still kept 
quiet, until his mother, under the pressure of 
his silence, began to scream. She could stand 
it no longer. When they rose from table and 
Edgar with his matter-of-course air of attach- 
ment proceded to follow her and the baron, 
her pent-up anger suddenly burst out. She 
cast prudence to the winds and let out the 
truth. Tortured by his crawling presence she 
reared like a horse pestered by crawling flies. 

“Why do you keep tagging after me like a 
child of three? I don’t want you around us 
all the time. Children should not always be 
with their elders. Please remember that. 
Spend an hour or two by yourself for once. 
Read something, or do whatever you want. 
Leave me alone. You make me nervous with 
your creepy ways and that disgusting hang- 
dog air of yours!” 

He had wrested it from her at last — the 
confession! He smiled, while the baron and 

96 


Silent Hostility 

his mother seemed embarrassed. She swung 
about, turning her back, and was about to 
leave, in a fury with herself for having ad- 
mitted so much to her little son, when Ed- 
gar’s voice came, saying coolly: 

“Papa does not want me to be by myself 
here. He made me promise not to be wild, 
and to stay with you.” Edgar emphasized 
“Papa,” having noticed on the previous occa- 
sion when he used the word that it had had a 
paralyzing effect upon both of them. In some 
way or other, therefore, he inferred, his father 
must be implicated in this great mystery and 
must have a secret power over them, because 
the very mention of him seemed to frighten 
and distress them. They said nothing this time 
either. They laid down their arms. 

The mother left the room with the baron, 
and Edgar followed behind, not humbly like 
a servitor, but hard, strict, inexorable, like a 
guard over prisoners, rattling the chains 
97 


The Burning Secret 

against which they strained in vain. Hate 
had steeled his child’s strength. He, the ig- 
norant one, was stronger than the two older 
people whose hands were held fast by the 
great secret. 


98 


CHAPTER IX 


THE LIARS 

Time was pressing. The baron’s holiday 
would soon come to an end, and the few days 
that remained must be exploited to the full. 
There was no use, both he and Edgar’s mother 
felt, trying to break down the excited child’s 
pertinacity. So they resorted to the extreme 
measure of disgraceful evasion and flight, 
merely to escape for an hour or two from 
under his yoke. 

“Please take these letters and have them 
registered at the post-office,” his mother said 
to Edgar in the hall, while the baron was out- 
side ordering a cab. Edgar, remembering 
that until then his mother had sent the hotel 
99 


The Burning Secret 

boys on her errands, was suspicious. Were 
they hatching something against him? He 
hesitated. 

“Where will you wait for me?” 

“Here.” 

“For sure?” 

“Yes.” 

“Now be sure to. Don’t leave before I come 
back. You’ll wait right here in the hall, won’t 
you?” In the consciousness of his superiority 
he had adopted a commanding tone with his 
mother. Many things had changed since the 
day before yesterday. 

At the door he encountered the baron, to 
whom he spoke for the first time in two days. 

“I am going to the post-office to register 
these letters. My mother is waiting for me. 
Please do not go until I come back.” 

The baron hastened past him. 

“All right. We’ll wait.” 

Edgar ran at top speed to the post-office, 

IOO 


The Liars 


where he had to wait while a man ahead of 
him asked a dozen silly questions. Finally 
his turn came, and at last he was free to run 
back to the hotel, which he reached just in time 
to see the couple driving off. He turned rigid 
with anger, and had the impulse to pick up a 
stone and throw it at them. So they had es- 
caped him after all, but by what a mean, con- 
temptible lie! He had discovered the day 
before that his mother lied, but that she 
could so wantonly disregard a definite, ex- 
pressed promise, shattered his last remnant of 
confidence. He could not understand life at 
all any more, now that he realized that the 
words which he had thought clothed a reality 
were nothing more than bursting bubbles. But 
what a dreadful secret it must be that drove 
grown-up people to such lengths, to lie to him, 
a child, and to steal away like criminals! 
In the books he had read, men deceived and 
murdered one another for money, power, 

IOI 


The Burning Secret 

empire, but what was the motive here? What 
were his mother and the baron after? Why 
did they hide from him? What were they, 
with their lies, trying to conceal? He racked 
his brain for answers to the riddle. Vaguely 
he divined that this secret was the bolt which, 
when unlocked, opened the door to let out 
childhood, and to master it meant to be grown 
up, to be a man at last. Oh, to know what it 
was! But he could no longer think clearly. 
His rage at their having escaped him was like 
a fire that sent scorching smoke into his eyes 
and kept him from seeing. 

He ran to the woods and in the nick of time 
reached a quiet dark spot, where no one could 
see him, and burst into tears. 

“Liars! Dogs! Mean — mean — mean!” 

He felt he must scream the words out to 
relieve himself of his frenzy. All the pent-up 
rage, impatience, annoyance, curiosity, impo- 
tence, and the sense of betrayal of the last few 
102 


The Liars 


days, which he had suppressed in the fond be- 
lief that he was an adult and must behave like 
an adult, now gushed from him in a fit of weep- 
ing and sobbing. It was the final crying spell 
of his childhood. For the last time he was 
giving in to the bliss of weeping like a woman. 
In that moment of uncontrolled fury his tears 
washed away his whole childhood, trust, love, 
credulity, respect. 

The lad who returned to the hotel was dif- 
ferent from the child that had left it. He 
was cool and level-headed. He went first to 
his room and washed his face carefully so that 
the two should not enjoy the triumph of 
seeing the traces of his tears. Then he 
planned his strategy and waited patiently, 
without the least agitation. 

There happened to be a good many guests in 
the hall when the carriage pulled up at the 
door. Two gentlemen were playing chess, a 
few others were reading their papers, and a 
103 


The Burning Secret 


group of ladies sat together talking. Edgar 
sat among them quietly, a trifle pale, with 
wavering glances. When his mother and the 
baron appeared in the doorway, rather em- 
barrassed at encountering him so soon, and 
began to stammer out their excuses prepared 
in advance, he confronted them calmly, and 
said to the baron in a tone of challenge: 

“I have something to say to you, sir.” 

“Very well, later, a little later.” 

Edgar, pitching his voice louder and enun- 
ciating every word clearly and distinctly, said, 
so that everyone in the hall could hear: 

“No, now. You behaved like a villain. 
You knew my mother was waiting for me, and 
you ” 

“Edgar!” cried his mother, feeling all 
glances upon her, and swooped down on him. 
But Edgar, realizing that she wanted to 
shout him down, screamed at the top of 
his voice: 


104 


The Liars 

“I say again, in front of everybody, you lied, 
you lied disgracefully. It was a dirty trick.” 

The baron went white, the people stared, 
some laughed. The mother clutched the boy, 
who was quivering with excitement, and stam- 
mered out hoarsely: 

“Go right up to your room, or I’ll give you 
a beating right here in front of everybody.” 

But Edgar had already calmed down. He 
regretted he had been so violent and was dis- 
contented with himself that he had not coolly 
challenged the baron as he had intended to 
do. But his anger had been stronger than his 
will. He turned and walked to the staircase 
leisurely, with an air of perfect composure. 

“You must excuse him,” the mother still 
went on, stammering, confused by the rather 
wicked glances fixed upon her, “he’s a nerv- 
ous child, you know.” 

She was afraid of nothing so much as a scan- 
dal, and she knew she must assume innocence. 

I0 5 


The Burning Secret 

Instead, therefore, of taking to instant flight, 
she went up to the desk and asked for her mail 
and made several other inquiries before 
rustling up the stairs as though nothing had 
happened. But behind her, she was quite con- 
scious, she had left a wake of whispered com- 
ment and suppressed giggling. On the first 
landing she hesitated, the rest of the steps she 
mounted more slowly. She was always un- 
equal to a serious situation and was afraid of 
the inevitable explanation with Edgar. She 
was guilty, she could not deny that, and she 
dreaded the child’s curious gaze, which par- 
alyzed her and filled her with uncertainty. 
In her timidity she decided to try gentleness, 
because in a battle the excited child, she knew, 
was the stronger. 

She turned the knob gently. Edgar was sit- 
ting there quiet and cool, his eyes, turned upon 
her at her entrance, not even betraying curi- 
osity. He seemed to be very sure of himself. 

106 


The Liars 

“Edgar,” she began, in the motherliest of 
tones, “what got into you? I was ashamed of 
you. How can one be so ill-bred, especially a 
child to a grown-up person? You must ask 
the baron’s pardon at once.” 

“I will not.” 

As he spoke Edgar was looking out of the 
window, and his words might have been meant 
for the trees. His sureness was beginning to 
astonish his mother. 

“Edgar, what’s the matter with you? You’re 
so different from what you were. You used 
to be a good, sensible child with whom a per- 
son could reason. And all at once you act as 
though the devil had got into you. What have 
you got against the baron? You liked him so 
much at first. He was so nice to you.” 

“Yes, because he wanted to make your ac- 
quaintance.” 

“Nonsense. How can you think anything 
like that?” 


107 


The Burning Secret 

The child flared up. 

“He’s a liar. He’s false through and 
through. Whatever he does is calculated and 
common. He wanted to get to know you, so 
he made friends with me and promised me a 
dog. I don’t know what he promised you, or 
why he’s so friendly with you, but he wants 
something of you, too, mamma, positively he 
does. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be so polite 
and friendly. He’s a bad man. He lies. Just 
take a good look at him once, and see how false 
his eyes are. Oh, I hate him!” 

“Edgar, how can you talk like that!” She 
was confused and did not know what to reply. 
The feeling stirred in her that the child was 
right. 

“Yes, he’s a bad man, you can’t make me 
believe he isn’t. You must see he is. Why is 
he afraid of me? Why does he try to keep 
out of my way? Because he knows I can see 
through him and his badness.” 

108 


The Liars 

“How can you talk like that?” she kept pro- 
testing feebly. Her brain seemed to have dried 
up. 

All of a sudden a great fear came upon her, 
whether of the baron or the boy, she knew not. 
Edgar saw that his warning was taking effect, 
and he was lured on to win her over to his side 
and have a comrade in his hate and hostility 
toward the baron. He went over to her gently, 
put his arms about her, and said in a voice 
flattering with the excitement quivering 
in it: 

“Mamma, you yourself must have noticed 
that it isn’t anything good that he wants. He’s 
made you quite different. You’re the one 
that’s changed, not I. He set you against me 
just to have you to himself. I’m sure he means 
to deceive you. I don’t know what he prom- 
ised you, but whatever it is, he doesn’t intend 
to keep his promise. You ought to be careful 
of him. A man who will lie to one person 
109 


The Burning Secret 

will lie to another person, too. He’s a bad, 
bad man. You mustn’t trust him.” 

Edgar’s voice, soft and almost tearful, 
seemed to speak out of her own heart. Since 
the day before an uncomfortable feeling had 
been rising in her which told her the same, 
with growing emphasis. But she was ashamed 
to tell her own child he was right, and she took 
refuge, as so many do when under the stress of 
overwhelming feeling, in rude rejoinder. She 
straightened herself up. 

“Children don’t understand such things. 
You have no right to mix into such matters. 
You must behave yourself. That’s all.” 

Edgar’s face congealed again. 

“Very well. I have warned you.” 

“Then you won’t ask the baron’s par- 
don?” 

“No.” 

They stood confronting each other, and the 
mother knew her authority was at stake, 
no 


The Liars 


“Then you will stay up here and eat by 
yourself, and you won’t be allowed to come to 
table and sit with us until you have asked his 
pardon. I’ll teach you manners. You won’t 
budge from this room until I give you per- 
mission to, do you hear?” 

Edgar smiled. That cunning smile seemed 
to be part of his lips now. Inwardly he was 
angry at himself. How foolish to have let his 
heart run away with him again and to have 
tried to warn her, the liar. 

His mother rustled out without giving him 
another glance. That caustic gaze of his 
frightened her. The child had become an ab- 
solute annoyance to her since she realized that 
he had his eyes open and said the very things 
she did not want to know or hear. It was un- 
canny to have an inner voice, her conscience, 
dissevered from herself, incorporated in her 
child, going about as her child, warning her 
and making fun of her. Until then the child 
hi 


The Burning Secret 

had stayed alongside of her life, as an orna- 
ment, a toy, a thing to love and have confi- 
dence in, now and then perhaps a burden, but 
always something that floated along in the 
same current as her own life, keeping even 
pace with it. For the first time this something 
reared itself up and opposed her will. A feel- 
ing akin to hate mingled itself in her thoughts 
of her child now. And yet, as she was de- 
scending the stairs, a little tired, childish voice 
came from her own breast, saying, “You ought 
to be careful of him.” 

On one of the landings was a mirror. The 
gleam of it struck her eyes, and she paused to 
scrutinize herself questioningly. She looked 
deeper and deeper into her own face until the 
lips of her image parted in a light smile and 
formed themselves as if to utter a dangerous 
word. The voice within her was still speak- 
ing, but she threw back her shoulders as 
though to shake off all those invisible thoughts, 
1 12 


gave her reflection in the glass a bright glance, 
caught up her skirt, and descended the rest of 
the stairs with the determined manner of a 
player who has tossed his last coin down on 
the table. 


CHAPTER X 


ON THE TRAIL 


The waiter, after serving Edgar with din- 
ner in his room, closed and locked the door 
behind him. The child started up in a rage. 
His mother’s doings! She must have given 
orders for him to be locked in like a vicious 
beast. 

“What’s going on downstairs,” he brooded 
grimly, “while I am locked in up here? What 
are they talking about, I wonder? Is the mys- 
tery taking place, and am I missing it? Oh, 
this secret that I scent all around me when I 
am with grown-ups, this thing that they shut 
me out from at night, and that makes them 
lower their voices when I come upon them 
unawares, this great secret that has been near 
me for days, close at hand, yet still out of 


On the Trail 


reach. I’ve done everything to try to get at 
it.” 

Edgar recalled the time when he had pil- 
fered books from his father’s library and had 
read them, and found they contained the mys- 
tery, though he could not understand it. 
There must be some sort of seal, he concluded, 
either in himself or in the others that had first 
to be removed before the mystery could be 
fathomed. He also recalled how he had 
begged the servant-girl to explain the obscure 
passages in the books and she had only laughed 
at him. 

“Dreadful,” he thought, “to be a child, full 
of curiosity, and yet not to be allowed even to 
ask for information, always to be ridiculed by 
the grown-ups, as if one were a stupid good- 
for-nothing. But never mind, I’m going to 
find it out, and very soon, I feel sure I will. 
Already part of it is in my hands, and I mean 
not to let go till I hold the whole of it.” 

115 


The Burning Secret 

He listened to find out if anyone were com- 
ing to the room. Outside, the trees were 
rustling in a strong breeze, which caught up 
the silvery mirror of the moonlight and dashed 
it in shivering bits through the network of the 
branches. 

“It can’t be anything good that they intend 
to do, else they wouldn’t have used such mean 
little lies to get me out of their way. Of 
course, they’re laughing at me, the miserable 
creatures, because they’re rid of me at last. 
But I’ll be the one to laugh next. How stupid 
of me to allow myself to be locked in this 
room and give them a moment to themselves, 
instead of sticking to them like a burr and 
watching their every move. I know the 
grown-ups are always incautious, and they will 
be giving themselves away, too. Grown-ups 
think we’re still babies and always go to sleep 
at night. They forget we can pretend to be 
asleep and can go on listening, and we can 


On the Trail 


make out we’re stupid when we’re really very 
bright.” 

Edgar smiled to himself sarcastically when 
at this point his thoughts reverted to the birth 
of a baby cousin. The family in his presence 
had pretended to be surprised, and he had 
known very well they were not surprised, be- 
cause for weeks he had heard them, at night 
when they thought he was asleep, discussing 
the coming event. And he resolved to fool his 
mother and the baron in the same way. 

“Oh, if only I could peep through the key- 
hole and watch them while they fancy they’re 
alone and safe. Perhaps it would be a good 
idea to ring, and the boy would come and open 
the door and ask what I want. Or I could 
make a terrible noise smashing things, and 
then they’d unlock the door and I’d slip out.” 

On second thought he decided against either 
plan, as incompatible with his pride. No one 
should see how contemptibly he had been 
117 


The Burning Secret 

treated, and he would wait till the next day. 

From beneath his window came a woman’s 
laugh. Edgar started. Perhaps it was his 
mother laughing. She had good cause to 
laugh and make fun of the helpless little boy 
who was locked up when he was a nuisance 
and thrown into a corner like a bundle of 
rags. He leaned, circumspectly out of the 
window and looked. No, it wasn’t his mother, 
but one of a group of gay girls teasing a boy. 

In looking out Edgar observed that his win- 
dow was not very high above the ground, and 
instantly it occurred to him to jump down and 
go spy on his mother and the baron. He was 
all fire with the joy of his resolve, feeling that 
now he had the great secret in his grasp. 
There was no danger in it. No people were 
passing by — and with that he had jumped out. 
Nothing but the light crunch of the gravel 
under his feet to betray his action. 

In these two days, stealing around and spy- 
118 


On the Trail 


ing had become the delight of his life, and in- 
tense bliss, mingled with a faint tremor of 
alarm, filled him now as he tiptoed around the 
outside of the hotel, carefully avoiding the 
lights. He looked first into the dining-room. 
Their seats were empty. From window to 
window he went peeping, always outside the 
hotel for fear if he went inside he might run 
up against them in one of the corridors. No- 
where were they to be seen, and he was about 
to give up hope when he saw two shadows 
emerge from a side entrance — he shrank and 
drew back into the dark — and his mother and 
her inseparable escort came out. 

In the nick of time, he thought. What were 
they saying? He couldn’t hear, they were 
talking in such low voices and the wind was 
making such an uproar in the trees. His 
mother laughed. It was a laugh he had never 
before heard from her, a peculiarly sharp, 
nervous laugh, as though she had suddenly 
119 


The Burning Secret 

been tickled. It made a curious impression on 
the boy and rather startled him. 

“But if she laughs,” he thought, “it can’t be 
anything dangerous, nothing very big and 
mighty that they are concealing from me.” He 
was a trifle disillusioned. “Yet, why were 
they leaving the hotel? Where were they go- 
ing alone together in the night?” 

Every now and then great drifts of clouds 
obscured the moon, and the darkness was then 
so intense that one could scarcely see the white 
road at one’s feet, but soon the moon would 
emerge again and robe the landscape in a 
sheet of silver. In one of the moments when 
the whole countryside was flooded in bril- 
liance Edgar saw the two silhouettes going 
down the road, or rather one silhouette, so 
close did they cling together, as if in terror. 
But where were they going? The fir-trees 
groaned, the woods were all astir, uncannily, 
as though from a wild chase in their depths. 

120 


On the Trail 


“I will follow them,” thought Edgar. “They 
cannot hear me in all this noise.” 

Keeping to the edge of ; the woods, in the 
shadow, from which he could easily see them 
on the clear white road, he tracked them re- 
lentlessly, blessing the wind for making his 
footsteps inaudible and cursing it for carrying 
away the sound of their talk. It was not until 
he heard what they said that he could be sure 
of learning the secret. 

The baron and his companion walked on 
without any misgivings. They felt all alone 
in the wide resounding night and lost them- 
selves in their growing excitement, never 
dreaming that on the high edges of the road, 
in the leafy darkness, every movement of theirs 
was being watched, and a pair of eyes was 
clutching them in a wild grip of hate and curi- 
osity. 

Suddenly they stood still, and Edgar, too, 
instantly stopped and pressed close up against 
121 


The Burning Secret 

a tree, in terror that they might turn back and 
reach the hotel before him, so that his mother 
would discover his room was empty and learn 
that she had been followed. Then he would 
have to give up hope of ever wresting the se- 
cret from them. But the couple hesitated. 
Evidently there was a difference of opinion 
between them. Fortunately at that moment 
the moon was shining undimmed by clouds, 
and he could see everything clearly. The 
baron pointed to a side-path leading down 
into the valley, where the moonlight de- 
scended, not in a broad flood of brilliance, but 
only in patches filtering here and there through 
the heavy foliage. 

“Why does he want to go down there?” 
thought Edgar. 

His mother, apparently, refused to take the 
path, and the baron was trying to persuade 
her. Edgar could tell from his gestures that 
he was talking emphatically. The child was 


122 


On the Trail 


alarmed. What did this man want of his 
mother? Why did he attempt — the villain! — 
to drag her into the dark? From his books, 
to him the world, came live memories of mur- 
der and seduction and sinister crime. There, 
he had it, the baron meant to murder her. That 
was why he had kept him, Edgar, at a dis- 
tance, and enticed her to this lonely spot. 
Should he cry for help? Murder! He 
wanted to shriek, but his throat and lips were 
dry and no sound issued from his mouth. His 
nerves were tense as a bow-string, he could 
scarcely stand upright on his shaking knees, 
and he put out his hand for support, when, 
crack, crack! a twig snapped in his grasp. 

At the sound of the breaking twig the two 
turned about in alarm and stared into the dark- 
ness. Edgar clung to the tree, his little body 
completely wrapped in obscurity, quiet as 
death. Yet they seemed to have been fright- 
ened. 


123 


The Burning Secret 


“Let’s go home,” he could now hear his 
mother say anxiously, and the baron, who, evi- 
dently, was also upset, assented. Pressed close 
against each other, they walked back very 
slowly. Their embarrassment was Edgar’s 
good fortune. He got down on all fours and 
crept, tearing his hands and clothes on the 
brambles, through the undergrowth to the turn 
of the woods, from where he ran breathlessly 
back to the hotel and up the stairs to his room. 
Luckily the key was sticking on the outside, 
and in one second he was in his room lying on 
the bed, where he had to rest a few moments 
to give his pounding heart a chance to quiet 
down. After two or three minutes he got up 
and looked out of the window to await their 
return. 

They must have been walking very slowly 
indeed. It took them an eternity. Circum- 
spectly he peeped out of the shadowed frame. 
There, at length, they came at a snail’s pace, 
124 


On the Trail 


the moonlight shining on their clothes. They 
looked like ghosts in the greenish shimmer, 
and the delicious horror came upon him again 
whether it really might have been a murder, 
and what a dreadful catastrophe he had 
averted by his presence. He could clearly see 
their faces, which looked chalky in the white 
light. His mother had an expression of rap- 
ture that in her was strange to him, while the 
baron looked hard and dejected. Probably 
because he had failed in carrying out his pur- 
pose. 

They were very close to the hotel now, but 
it was not until they reached the steps that 
their figures separated from each other. 
Would they look up? Edgar waited eagerly. 
No. 

“They have forgotten all about me,” he 
thought wrathfully, and then, in triumph, “but 
I haven’t forgotten you. You think I am 
asleep or non-existent, but you’ll find out 
125 


The Burning Secret 


you’re mistaken. I’ll watch every step you 
take until I have got the secret out of you, you 
villain, the dreadful secret that keeps me 
awake nights. I’ll tear the strings that tie you 
two together. I am not going to go to sleep.” 

As the couple entered the doorway, their 
shadows mingled again in one broad band that 
soon dwindled and disappeared. And once 
more the space in front of the hotel lay se- 
rene in the moonlight, like a meadow of snow. 


126 


CHAPTER XI 


THE SURPRISE ATTACK 

Edgar moved away from the window, 
breathing heavily, in a shiver of horror. A 
gruesome mystery of this sort had never 
touched his life before, the bookish world of 
thrilling adventure, excitement, deception and 
murder having always belonged to the same 
realm as the wonderland of fairy tales, the 
realm of dreams, far away, in the unreal and 
unattainable. Now he was plunged right into 
the midst of this fascinatingly awful world, 
and his whole being quivered deliriously. 
Who was this mysterious being who had 
stepped into his quiet life? Was he really a 
murderer? If not, why did he always try to 
drag his mother to a remote, dark spot? 

127 


The Burning Secret 

Something dreadful, Edgar felt certain, was 
about to happen. He did not know what to 
do. In the morning he would surely write or 
telegraph his father — or why not that very 
moment? His mother was not in her room 
yet, but was still with that horrid person. 

The outside of the door to Edgar’s room was 
hung with a portiere, and he opened his door 
softly now, closed it behind him, and stuck 
himself between the door and the portiere, lis- 
tening for his mother’s steps in the corridor, 
determined not to let her stay by herself a sin- 
gle instant. 

The corridor, at this midnight hour, was 
quiet and empty and lighted faintly by a sin- 
gle gas jet. The minutes stretched themselves 
into hours, it seemed, before he heard cautious 
footsteps coming up the stairs. He strained 
his ears to listen. The steps did not move for- 
ward with the quick, regular beat of someone 
making straight for his room, but sounded hes- 
128 


The Surprise Attack 


itating and dragging as though up a steep, dif- 
ficult climb. Edgar also caught the sound of 
whispering, a pause, then whispering again. 
He was aquiv* - with excitement. Was it both 
of them coming up together? Was the crea- 
ture still sticking to her? The whispering was 
too low and far away for him to catch what 
they were saying. But the footsteps, though 
slowly and with pauses between, were draw- 
ing nearer. And now he could hear the bar- 
on’s voice — oh, how he hated the sound of it! 
— saying something in a low, hoarse tone, 
which he could not get, and then his mother 
answering as though to ward something 
off: 

“No, no, not tonight!” 

Edgar’s excitement rose to fever heat. As 
they came nearer he would be bound to catch 
everything they said. Each inch closer that 
they drew was like a physical hurt in his 
breast, and the baron’s voice, how ugly it 
129 


The Burnmg Secret 

seemed, that greedy, grasping disgusting 
voice. 

“Don’t be cruel. You were so lovely this 
evening.” 

“No, no, I mustn’t. I can’t. Let me go.” 

There was such alarm in his mother’s voice 
that the child was terrified. What did the 
baron want her to do? Why was she afraid? 

They were quite close up to him now, ap- 
parently right in front of the portiere. A foot 
or two away from them was he, trembling, in- 
visible, with a bit of drapery for his only pro- 
tection. 

Edgar heard his mother give a faint groan, 
as though her powers of resistance were weak- 
ening. 

But what was that? Edgar could hear that 
they had passed his mother’s door and had kept 
on walking down the corridor. Wkere was 
he dragging her off to? Why was she not re- 
plying any more? Had he stuffed his hand- 
130 


The Surprise Attack 

kerchief into her mouth and was he squeezing 
her throat? 

Wild with this thought, Edgar pushed the 
portiere aside and peeped out at the two fig- 
ures in the dim corridor. The baron had his 
arm round the woman’s waist and was forcing 
her along gently, evidently with little resist- 
ance from her. He stopped at his own 
door. 

“He wants to drag her in and commit the 
foul deed,” though the child, and dashing the 
portiere aside he rushed down the hall upon 
them. 

His mother screamed; something came 
leaping at her out of the dark, and she 
seemed to fall in a faint. The baron held her 
up with difficulty. The next instant he felt a 
little fist dealing him a blow that smashed his 
lips against his teeth, and a little body claw- 
ing at him catlike. He released the terrified 
woman, who quickly made her escape, and, 


The Burning Secret 

without knowing against whom, he struck out 
blindly. 

The child knew he was the weaker of the 
two, yet he never yielded. At last, at last the 
great moment had come when he could un- 
burden himself of all his betrayed love and ac- 
cumulated hate. With set lips and a look of 
frenzy on his face he pounded away at the 
baron with his two small fists. 

By this time the baron had recognized his 
assailant. He, too, was primed with hate of 
the little spy who had been dogging him and 
interfering with his sport, and he hit back, 
striking out blindly. Edgar groaned once or 
twice, but did not let go, and did not cry for 
help. They wrestled a fraction of a minute 
in the dark corridor grimly and sullenly with- 
out the exchange of a single word. But pretty 
soon the baron came to his senses and realiz- 
ing how absurd was this duel with a half- 
grown boy he caught hold of Edgar to 
132 


The Surprise Attack 

throw him off. But Edgar, feeling his muscles 
weakening and conscious that the next moment 
he would be beaten, snapped, in a fury, at the 
strong, firm hand gripping at the nape of his 
neck. The baron could not restrain a slight 
outcry, and let go of Edgar, who seized the 
opportunity to run to his room and draw the 
bolt. 

The midnight struggle had lasted no more 
than a minute. No one in any of the rooms 
along the corridor had caught a sound of it. 
Everything was silent, wrapped in sleep. 

The baron wiped his bleeding hand with his 
handkerchief and peered into the dark un- 
easily to make sure no one had been watching 
or listening. All he saw was the one gas jet 
winking at him, he thought, sarcastically. 


133 


CHAPTER XII 


THE TEMPEST 

EDGAR woke up the next morning dazed, 
wondering whether it had not been a horrid 
dream, and with the sickly feeling that hangs 
on after a nightmare, his head leaden and his 
body like a piece of wood. It was only after 
a minute or so that he realized with a sort of 
alarm that he was still in his day clothes. He 
jumped out of bed and went to look at him- 
self in the mirror. The image of his own pale, 
distorted face, with his hair all rumpled and 
a red, elongated swelling on his forehead, 
made him recoil with a shudder. It brought 
back to him the actuality painfully. He 
recalled the details of the battle in the corri- 


i34 


The Tempest 

dor, and his rushing back to his room and 
throwing himself on to the bed dressed. He 
must have fallen asleep thus and dreamed 
everything over again, only worse and mingled 
with the warmish smell of fresh flowing blood. 

Footsteps crunched on the gravel beneath 
his window, voices rose like invisible birds, 
and the sun shone deep into the room. “It 
must be very late,” he thought, glancing at his 
watch. But the hands pointed to midnight. 
In the excitement of the day before he had 
forgotten to wind it up. This uncertainty, this 
hanging suspended in time, disturbed him, 
and his sense of disgust was increased by his 
confusion of mind as to what had actually oc- 
curred. He dressed quickly and went down- 
stairs, a vague sense of guilt in his heart. 

In the breakfast-room his mother was sit- 
ting at their usual table, alone. Thank good- 
ness, his enemy was not present. Edgar would 
not have to look upon that hateful face of his. 
i35 


The Burning Secret 


And yet, as he went to the table, he was by no 
means sure of himself. 

“Good morning,” he said. 

His mother made no reply, nor even so 
much as glanced up, but kept her eyes fixed 
in a peculiarly rigid stare on the view from 
the window. She looked very pale, her eyes 
were red-rimmed, and there was that quiver- 
ing of her nostrils which told so plainly how 
wrought up she was. Edgar bit his lips. Her 
silence bewildered him. He really did not 
know whether he had hurt the baron very 
much or whether his mother had any knowl- 
edge at all of their encounter. The uncer- 
tainty plagued him. But her face remained 
so rigid that he did not even attempt to look 
up for fear that her eyes, now hidden behind 
lowered lids, might suddenly raise their cur- 
tains and pop out at him. He sat very still, 
not daring to make the faintest sound, and 
raising the cup to his lips and putting it back 
136 


The Tempest 


on the saucer with the utmost caution, and 
casting furtive glances, from time to time, at 
his mother’s fingers, which played with her 
spoon nervously and seemed, in the way they 
were bent, to show a secret anger. 

For a full quarter of an hour he sat at the 
table in an oppressive expectancy of some- 
thing that never came. Not a single word 
from her to relieve his tension. And now as 
his mother rose, still without any sign of hav- 
ing noticed his presence, he did not know what 
to do, whether to remain sitting at the table 
or to go with her. He decided upon the lat- 
ter, and followed humbly, though conscious 
how ridiculous was his shadowing of her now. 
He reduced his steps so as to fall behind, and 
she, still studiously refraining from noticing 
him, went to her room. When Edgar reached 
her door he found it locked. 

What had happened? He was at his wits’ 
end. His assurance of the day before had de- 
i37 


The Burning Secret 

serted him. Had he done wrong, after all, in 
attacking the baron? And were they prepar- 
ing a punishment for him or a fresh humilia- 
tion? Something must happen, he was posi- 
tive, something dreadful, very soon. 

Upon him and his mother lay the sultriness 
of a brewing tempest. They were like two 
electrified poles that would have to discharge 
themselves in a flash. And for four solitary 
hours the child dragged round with him, from 
room to room, the burden of this premonition, 
until his thin little neck bent under the invis- 
ible yoke, and by midday it was a very humble 
little fellow that took his seat at table. 

“How do you do?” he ventured again, feel- 
ing he had to rend this silence, ominous as a 
great black storm cloud. But still his mother 
made no response, keeping her gaze fixed be- 
yond him. 

Edgar, in renewed alarm, felt he was in the 
presence of a calculated, concentrated anger 
138 


The Tempest 

such as he had never before encountered. 
Until then his mother’s scoldings had been out- 
bursts of nervousness rather than of ill feeling 
and soon melted into a mollifying smile. This 
time, however, he had, as he sensed, brought 
to the surface a wild emotion from the deeps 
of her being, and this powerful something that 
he had evoked terrified him. He scarcely 
dared to eat. His throat was parched and 
knotted into a lump. 

His mother seemed not to notice what was 
passing in her son, but when she got up she 
turned, with a casual air, and said: 

“Come up to my room afterwards, Edgar, 
I have something to say to you.” 

Her tone was not threatening, but so icy 
that Edgar felt as though each word were like 
a link in an iron chain being laid round his 
neck. His defiance had been crushed out of 
him. Silently, with a hang-dog air, he fol- 
lowed her up to her room. 

i39 


The Burning Secret 

In the room she prolonged his agony by say- 
ing nothing for several minutes, during which 
he heard the striking of the clock, and out- 
side a child laughing, and within his own 
breast his heart beating like a trip-hammer. 
Yet she, too, could not be feeling so very con- 
fident of herself either, because she kept her 
eyes averted and even turned her back while 
speaking to him. 

“I shall say nothing to you about the way 
you behaved yesterday. It was unpardonable, 
and it makes me feel ashamed to think of it. 
You have to suffer the consequences now of 
your own conduct. All I mean to say to you is 
that this is the last time you will be allowed to 
associate with your elders. I have just writ- 
ten to your father that either you must be put 
under a tutor or sent to a boarding-school 
where you will be taught manners. I sha’n’t 
be bothered with you any more.” 

Edgar stood with bowed head, feeling that 
140 


The Tempest 

this was only the preliminary, a threat of the 
real thing coming, and he waited uneasily for 
the sequel. 

“You will ask the baron’s pardon.” Edgar 
gave a start, but his mother would not be in- 
terrupted. “The baron left to-day, and you 
will write him a letter which I shall dictate.” 
Edgar again made a movement, which his 
mother firmly disregarded. “No protesta- 
tions. Here is the paper, and here are the pen 
and the ink. Sit down.” 

Edgar looked up. Her eyes were steely 
with an inflexible determination. This hard- 
ness and composure in his mother were quite 
new and strange. He was frightened, and 
seated himself at the desk, keeping his face 
bent low. 

“The date — upper right-hand corner. 
Have you written it? Space. Dear Sir, colon. 
Next line. I have just learned to my regret — 
got that? — to my regret that you have already 


The Burning Secret 

left Summering. Two m’s in Summering. 
And so I must do by letter what I had in- 
tended to do in person, that is — faster, Edgar, 
you don’t have to draw each letter — beg your 
pardon for what I did yesterday. As my 
mother told you, I am just convalescing from 
a severe illness and am very excitable. On ac- 
count of my condition, I often exaggerate 
things and the next moment I am sorry for it.” 

The back bent over the desk straightened 
up. Edgar turned in a flash. His defiance had 
leapt into life again. 

“I will not write that. It isn’t true.” 

“Edgar!” 

“It is not true. I haven’t done anything that 
I should be sorry for. I haven’t done anything 
bad that I need ask anybody’s pardon for. I 
simply came to your rescue when you called 
for help.” 

Every drop of blood left her lips, her nos- 
trils widened. 


142 


The Tempest 

“I called for help? You’re crazy.” 

Edgar got angry and jumped up from his 
chair. 

“Yes, you did call for help, in the corridor, 
when he caught hold of you. You said, ‘Let 
me go, let me go,’ so loud that I heard it in my 
room.” 

“You lie. I never was in the corridor with 
the baron. He went with me only as far as 
the foot of the stairs ” 

Edgar’s heart stood still at the barefaced- 
ness of the lie. He stared at her with glassy 
eyeballs, and cried in a voice thick and husky 
with passion : 

“You — were not — in the hall? And he — he 
did not have his arm round you?” 

She laughed a cold, dry laugh. 

“You were dreaming.” 

That was too much. The child, by this 
time, knew that adults lie and resort to impu- 
dent little evasions, lies that slip through fine 
M3 


The Burning Secret 

sieves, and cunning ambiguities. But this 
downright denial of an absolute fact, face to 
face, threw him into a frenzy. 

“Dreaming, was I ? Did I dream this bump 
on my forehead, too?” 

“How do I know whom you’ve been rowdy- 
ing with? But I am not going to argue with 
you. You are to obey orders. That’s all. Sit 
down and finish the letter.” She was very 
pale and was summoning all her strength to 
keep on her feet. 

In Edgar, a last tiny flame of credulity went 
out. To tread on the truth and extinguish it 
as one would a burning match was more than 
he could stomach. His insides congealed in 
an icy lump, and everything he now said was 
in a tone of unrestrained, pointed malicious- 
ness. 

“So I dreamed what I saw in the hall, did 
I? I dreamed this bump on my forehead, and 
that you two went walking in the moonlight 
144 


The Tempest 

and he wanted to make you go down the dark 
path into the valley? I dreamed all that, did 
I? What do you think, that I am going to let 
myself be locked up like a baby? No, I am 
not so stupid as you think. I know what I 
know.” 

He stared into her face impudently. To 
see her child’s face close to her own distorted 
by hate broke her down completely. Her pas- 
sion flooded over in a tidal wave. 

“Sit down and write that letter, or ” 

“Or what?” he sneered. 

“Or I’ll give you a whipping like a little 
child.” 

Edgar drew close to her and merely laughed 
sardonically. 

With that her hand was out and had struck 
his face. Edgar gave a little outcry, and, like 
a drowning man, with a dull rushing in his 
ears and flickerings in his eyes, he struck out 
blindly with both fists. He felt he encountered 
145 


The Burning Secret 

something soft, a face, heard a cry . . . 

The cry brought him to his senses. Sud- 
denly he saw himself and his monstrous act — 
he had struck his own mother. 

A dreadful terror came upon him, shame 
and horror, an impetuous need to get away 
seized him, to sink into the earth; he wanted to 
fly far away, far away from those eyes that 
were upon him. He made for the door and 
in an instant was gone, down the stairs, 
through the lobby, out on the road. Away, 
away, as though a pack of ravening beasts 
were at his heels. 


146 


CHAPTER XIII 


DAWNING PERCEPTION 

AFTER he had put a long stretch of road be- 
tween him and the hotel, Edgar stopped run- 
ning. He was panting heavily, and he had 
to lean against a tree to get his breath back 
and recover from the trembling of his knees. 
The horror of his own deed, from which he 
had been fleeing, clutched at his throat and 
shook him as with a fever. What should he 
do now? Where should he run away to? He 
was already feeling a sinking sensation of lone- 
liness, there in the woods, only a mile or so 
from the house. Everything seemed differ- 
ent, unfriendlier, unkinder, now that he was 
alone and helpless. The trees that only the 
day before had whispered to him like broth- 
147 


The Burning Secret 

ers now gathered together darkly as if in 
threat. This solitariness in the great unknown 
world dazed the child. No, he could not stand 
alone yet. But to whom should he go? Of 
his father, who was easily excited and unap- 
proachable, he was afraid. Besides, his father 
would send him straight back to his mother, 
and Edgar preferred the awfulness of the un- 
known to that. He felt as though he could 
never look upon his mother’s face again with- 
out remembering that he had struck her with 
his fist. 

His grandmother in Bains occurred to him. 
She was so sweet and kind and had always 
petted him and come to his rescue when, at 
home, he was to be the victim of an injustice. 
He would stay with her until the first storm 
of wrath had blown over, and then he would 
write to his parents to ask their forgiveness. 
In this brief quarter of an hour he had al- 
ready been so humbled by the mere thought 
148 


Dawning Perception 

of his inexperienced self standing alone in the 
world that he cursed the stupid pride that a 
mere stranger’s lying had put into him. He 
no longer wanted to be anything but the child 
he had been, obedient and patient and without 
the arrogance that he now felt to be excessive. 

But how to reach Bains? He took out his 
little pocketbook and blessed his luck star that 
the ten-dollar gold piece given him on his 
birthday was there safe and sound. He had 
never got himself to break it. Daily he had 
inspected his purse to see if it was there and to 
feast his eyes on the sight of it and gratefully 
polish it with his handkerchief until it shone 
like a tiny sun. But would the ten dollars be 
enough? He had travelled by train many a 
time without thinking that one had to pay, and 
still less how much one paid, whether ten or 
a hundred dollars. For the first time he got 
an inkling that there were facts in life upon 
which he had never reflected, and that all the 
149 


The Burning Secret 

many things that surrounded him and he had 
held in his hands and toyed with somehow con- 
tained a value of their own, a special impor- 
tance. An hour before he had thought he knew 
everything. Now he realized he had passed 
by a thousand mysteries and problems with- 
out noticing them, and was ashamed that his 
poor little wisdom had stumbled over the first 
step it took into life. He grew more and more 
discouraged, and his footsteps lagged as he 
drew near the station. 

How often he had dreamed of this flight 
from home, of making a dash for the great 
Life, becoming king or emperor, soldier or 
poet! And now he looked timidly at the 
bright little building ahead of him and 
thought of nothing but whether his ten dollars 
would bring him to his grandmother at Bains. 

The rails stretched away monotonously into 
the country, the station was deserted. Edgar 
went to the window shyly and asked, whisper- 
150 


Dawning Perception 

ing so that nobody but the ticket-seller should 
hear, how much a ticket to Bains cost. 
Amused and rather astonished eyes behind 
spectacles smiled upon the timid child. 

“Whole fare or half fare?” 

“Whole fare,” stammered Edgar, utterly 
without pride. 

“Three dollars and thirty-five cents.” 

“Give me a ticket, please.” 

In great relief Edgar shoved the beloved bit 
of polished gold under the grating, change rat- 
tled on the ledge, and Edgar all at once felt 
immensely wealthy holding the strip of col- 
ored paper that guaranteed him his liberty, 
and with the sound of coin clinking in his 
pocket. 

On examining the timetable he found there 
would be a train in only twenty minutes, and 
he retired to a corner, to get away from the 
few people idling on the platform. Though it 
was evident they were harboring no suspi- 
151 


The Turning Secret 

cions, the child, as if his flight and his crime 
were branded on his forehead, felt that they 
were looking at nothing but him and were 
wondering why a mere boy such as he should 
be travelling alone. He drew a great sigh of 
relief when at last the first whistle sounded in 
the distance, and the rumbling came closer and 
closer, and the train that was to carry him out 
into the great world puffed and snorted into 
the station. 

It was not until Edgar took his seat in the 
train that he noticed he had secured only a 
third-class passage. Having always travelled 
first class, he was again struck with a sense of 
difference. He saw there were distinctions 
that had escaped him. His fellow-passengers 
were unlike those of his first-class trips, a few 
Italian laborers, with tough hands and un- 
couth voices, carrying pickaxes and shovels. 
They sat directly opposite, dull and disconso- 
late-eyed, staring into space. They must have 
152 


Dawning Perception 


been working very hard on the road, for some 
of them slept in the rattling coach, open- 
mouthed, leaning against the hard, soiled 
wood. 

“They have been working to earn money,” 
came into Edgar’s mind, and he set to guess- 
ing how much they earned, but could not de- 
cide. And so another disturbing fact im- 
pressed itself upon him, that money was some- 
thing one did not always have on hand, but 
had to be made somehow or other. And for 
the first time he became conscious of having 
taken the ease in which he had been lapped as 
a matter of course and that to the right and 
the left of him abysms yawned which his eyes 
had never beheld. It came to him now with 
the shock of suddenness that there were trades 
and professions, that his life was hedged about 
by innumerable secrets, close at hand and tan- 
gible, though he had never noticed them. 

Edgar was learning a good deal in that sin- 
153 


The Burning Secret 

gle hour of aloneness and saw many things as 
he looked out of his narrow compartment into 
the great wide world. And for all his dark 
dread, something began to unfold itself gently 
within him, not exactly happiness as yet, 
rather a marvelling at the diversity of life. 
He had fled, he felt, out of fear and cowardice, 
yet it was his first independent act, and he had 
experienced something of the reality that he 
had passed by, until then, without heeding it. 
Perhaps he himself was now as much of a 
mystery to his mother and his father as the 
world had been to him. It was with different 
eyes that he looked out of the window. He 
was now viewing actualities, it seemed to him. 
A veil had been lifted from all things, and 
they were showing him the core of their pur- 
pose, the secret spring of their actions. 
Houses flew by as though torn away by the 
wind, and he pictured to himself the people 
living in them. Were they rich or poor, 
i54 


Dawning Perception 

happy or unhappy? Were they filled with the 
same longing as he to know everything? And 
were there children in those houses like him- 
self who had merely been playing with things ? 
The flagmen who waved the train no longer 
seemed like scattered dolls, inanimate objects, 
toys stationed there by indifferent chance. 
Edgar now understood that the giving of the 
signal was their fate, their struggle with life. 

The wheels turned faster and faster, along 
serpentine windings the train made its way 
downward from the uplands, the mountains 
took on gentler curves and receded into the 
distance. The level was reached, and Edgar 
gave one final glance backward. There were 
the mountains like blue shadows, remote and 
inaccessible. And to Edgar it was as though 
his childhood were reposing up there where 
they lightly merged with the misty heavens. 
iS5 


CHAPTER XIV 


DARKNESS AND CONFUSION 

When the train pulled into the station at 
Bains, the street lamps were already lit, and 
though the station was bright with its red and 
white and green signals, Edgar unexpectedly 
felt a dread of the approaching night. In the 
daytime he would still have been confident. 
People would have been thronging the streets, 
and you could sit down on a bench and rest, 
or look into the shop windows. But how 
would he be able to stand it when the people 
had all withdrawn into their homes and gone 
to bed for a night’s peaceful sleep while he, 
conscious of wrongdoing, wandered about 
alone in a strange city? Just to have a roof 
over his head, not to spend another moment 
156 


Darkness and Confusion 

under the open heavens! That was his one 
distinct feeling. 

He hurried along the familiar w’ay with- 
out looking to right or left until he reached 
his grandmother’s villa. It was on a beauti- 
ful, broad avenue, placed, not free to the gaze 
of passersby but behind the vines and shrub- 
bery and ivy of a well-kept garden, a gleam 
behind a cloud of green, a white, old-fash- 
ioned, friendly house. Edgar peeped through 
the iron grill like a stranger. No sound came 
from within and the windows were closed. 
Evidently the family and guests were in the 
garden behind the house. 

Edgar was about to pull the door-bell when 
something odd occurred. Suddenly the thing 
that only a few hours before had seemed quite 
natural to him had now become impossible. 
How was he to go into the house, how meet 
his grandmother and her family, how endure 
all the questions they would besiege him with, 
157 


The Burning Secret 


and how answer them? How would he be 
able to bear the looks they would give him 
when he would tell, as he would be obliged to, 
that he had run away from his mother? And, 
above all, how would he explain his monstrous 
deed, which he himself no longer understood? 
A door in the house slammed, and Edgar, in 
a sudden panic at being detected, ran off. 

When he reached the park he paused. It 
was dark there, and he expected to find it 
empty and thought it would be a good 
place to sit down in and rest and at last reflect 
quietly and come to some understanding with 
himself about his fate. He passed through 
the gateway timidly. A few lamps were burn- 
ing near the entrance, giving the young leaves 
on the trees a ghostly gleam of transparent 
green, but deeper in the park, down the hill, 
everything lay like a single, black, fermenting 
mass in the darkness. 

Edgar, eager to be alone, slipped past the 
158 


Darkness and Confusion 

few people who were sitting in the light of 
the lamps, talking or reading. But even in the 
deep shadows of the unilluminated pathways 
it was not quiet. There were low whisperings 
that seemed to shun the light, sounds mingled 
with the rustling of the leaves, the scraping of 
feet, subdued voices, all mingled with a cer- 
tain voluptuous, sighing, groaning sound that 
seemed to emanate from people and animals 
and nature, all in a disturbed sleep. It was 
a restlessness that had something foreboding 
in it, something sneaking, hidden, puzzling, a 
sort of subterranean stirring in the wood that 
was connected perhaps with nothing but the 
spring, yet had a peculiarly alarming effect 
upon the child. 

He cowered into a diminutive heap on a 
bench and tried to think of what he was to say 
at home. But his thoughts slipped away from 
him as on a slippery surface before he could 
grasp his own ideas, and in spite of himself he 
i59 


The Burning Secret 

had to keep listening and listening to the muf- 
fled tones, the mystical voices of the darkness. 
How terrible the darkness was, how bewilder- 
ing and yet how mysteriously beautiful! 

Were they animals, or people, or was it 
merely the ghostly hand of the wind that wove 
together all this rustling and crackling and 
whirring? He listened. It was the wind 
gently moving the tree tops. No, it wasn’t, it 
was people — now he could see distinctly — 
couples arm in arm, who came up from the 
lighted city to enliven the darkness with their 
perplexing presence. What were they after? 
He could not make out. They were not talk- 
ing to each other, because he heard no voices. 
All he could catch was the sound of their tread 
on the gravel and here and there the sight of 
their figures moving like shadows past some 
clear space between the trees, always with 
their arms round each other, like his mother 
and the baron in the moonlight. 

160 


Darkness and Confusion 

So the great, dazzling, portentous secret was 
here, too. 

Steps approached. A subdued laugh. Ed- 
gar, for fear of being discovered, drew deeper 
into the dark. But the couple now groping 
their way in the deep gloom had no eyes for 
him. They passed him by, closely locked, and 
they stopped only a few feet beyond his bench. 
They pressed their faces together. Edgar 
could not see clearly, but he heard a soft groan 
from the woman, and the man stammering 
mad, ardent words. A sort of sultry presenti- 
ment touched Edgar’s alarm with a shudder 
that was sensual and pleasant. 

The couple stayed thus a minute or so, 
and then the gravel crunched under their 
tread again, and the sound of their footsteps 
died away in the darkness. 

A tremor went through Edgar. His blood 
whirled hot through his veins, and all of a 
sudden he felt unbearably alone in this be- 
161 


The Burning Secret 

wildering darkness, and the need came upon 
him with elemental force for the sound of a 
friend’s voice, an embrace, a bright room, peo- 
ple he loved. The whole perplexing dark of 
this night seemed to be inside his breast and 
rending it. 

He jumped up. To be at home, just to be 
at home, anywhere at home in a warm, bright 
room, in some relation with people. What 
could happen to him then? Even if they were 
to scold and beat him, he would not mind after 
that darkness and the dread of loneliness. 

Unconsciously he made his way back to his 
grandmother’s villa, and found himself stand- 
ing with the cool doorbell in his hand again. 
Now, he observed, the lighted windows were 
shining through the foliage, and he pictured 
each room belonging to each window and the 
people inside. This very proximity to famil- 
iar beings, the comforting sense of being near 
people who, he knew, loved him was delight- 
162 


Darkness and Confusion 

ful, and if he hesitated it was simply to taste 
this joy a little longer. 

Suddenly a terrified voice behind him 
shrieked : 

“Edgar! Why, here he is!” 

It was his grandmother’s maid. She 
pounced on him and grabbed his hand. The 
door was pulled open from within, a dog 
jumped at Edgar, barking, people came run- 
ning, and voices of mingled alarm and joy 
called out. The first to meet Edgar was his 
grandmother with outstretched arms, and be- 
hind her — he thought he must be dreaming — 
his mother. 

Tears came to Edgar’s eyes, and he stood 
amid this ardent outburst of emotions quiver- 
ing and intimidated, undecided what to say or 
do and very uncertain of his own feelings. He 
was not sure whether he was glad or fright- 
ened. 


CHAPTER XV 


THE LAST DREAM 

They had been looking for him in Bains 
for some time. His mother, in spite of her 
anger, had been alarmed when he did not re- 
turn, and had had search made for him all 
over Summering. The whole place was 
aroused, and people were making every sort 
of dreadful conjecture when a man brought 
the news that he had seen the child at the 
ticket-office. Inquiry at the railroad station, 
of course, brought out that Edgar had bought 
a ticket to Bains, and his mother, without 
hesitation, took the very next train after him, 
telegraphing first to his father and to his 
grandmother. 

The family held on to Edgar, but not for- 
164 


The Last Dream 

cibly. On the contrary, they led him with an 
air of suppressed triumph into the front room. 
And how odd it was that he did not mind their 
reproaches, because he saw happiness and love 
in their eyes. And even their assumed anger 
lasted only a second or two. His grandmother 
was embracing him again tearfully, no one 
spoke of his bad conduct, and he felt the won- 
drousness of the protection surrounding him. 

The maid took off his coat and brought him 
a warmer one, and his grandmother asked if 
he did not want something to eat. They pes- 
tered him with their inquiries and their ten- 
derness, but stopped questioning him when 
they noticed how embarrassed he was. He 
experienced deliciously the sensation that he 
had so despised before of being wholly a child, 
and he was ashamed of his arrogance of the 
last few days when he had wanted to dispense 
with it all and exchange it for the deceptive 
joy of solitariness. 

1 65 


The Burning Secret 

The telephone rang in the next room. He 
heard his mother’s voice in snatches, “Edgar 
— back. Got here — last train,” and he mar- 
velled that she had not flown at him in a pas- 
sion. She had put her arms round him, with a 
peculiarly constrained expression in her 
eyes. 

He began to regret his conduct more and 
more, and he would have liked to extricate 
himself from his grandmother’s and aunt’s 
tenderness, to run to his mother and beg her 
pardon and tell her, by herself, oh, so humbly, 
that he wanted to be a child again and obey 
her. But when he rose, with a perfectly gen- 
tle movement, his grandmother asked in alarm 
where he was going. He felt ashamed. If he 
made a single step it frightened them. He had 
frightened them all terribly, and they were 
afraid he was going to run away again. How 
could he make them understand that nobody 
regretted his flight more than he did? 

166 


The hast Dream 

The table was set, supper had been pre- 
pared for him hurriedly. His grandmother 
sat beside him without removing her eyes from 
him. She and his aunt and the maid held him 
fast in a quiet circle, the warmth of which 
calmed him wonderfully, and the only dis- 
turbing thought was that of his mother’s ab- 
sence from the room. If only she could have 
guessed how humble he was she would cer- 
tainly have come in. 

From outside came the sound of a cab draw- 
ing up at the door. Everyone gave a start, so 
that Edgar also was upset. His grandmother 
went out, he could hear loud voices in the hall, 
and then it struck him it must be his father 
who had arrived. He observed timidly that 
he had been left alone in the room. To be 
alone even for those few moments made him 
nervous. His father was a stern man; he was 
the one person Edgar really feared. He 
listened. His father seemed to be excited; 

167 


The Burning Secret 

his voice was loud and expressed annoyance. 
Every now and then came his grandmother’s 
and his mother’s voices in mollifying tones, in 
attempts, evidently, to make him adopt a 
milder attitude. But his father’s voice re- 
mained hard — hard as his foot-treads now 
coming nearer and nearer, and now stopping 
short at the door, which was next pulled vio- 
lently open. 

The boy’s father was a large man, and Ed- 
gar felt so very, very thin beside him as he 
entered the room, nervous and genuinely an- 
gry, it seemed. 

“What got into your head to run away? 
How could you give your mother such a 
fright?” His voice was wrathful and his 
hands made a wild movement. 

Edgar’s mother came in and stood behind 
her husband, her face in shadow. 

Edgar made no reply. He felt he had to 
justify himself, but how tell the story of the 


The hast Dream 


way they had lied to him and how his mother 
had slapped him? Would his father under- 
stand? 

“Well, where’s your tongue? What was the 
matter? You may tell me, you needn’t be. 
afraid. You must have had some good reason 
for running away. Did anyone do anything 
to you?” 

Edgar hesitated. At the recollection of the 
events in Summering, his anger began to flare 
up again, and he was about to bring his 
charge against his mother when he saw — his 
heart stood still — that she was making an odd 
gesture behind his father’s back. At first he 
did not comprehend. But he kept his eyes 
fixed on her and noticed that the expression of 
her face was beseeching. Then very, very 
softly she lifted her finger to her mouth in 
sign that he should keep everything to him- 
self. 

The child was conscious of a great wild joy 
169 


The Burning Secret 

pouring in a warm wave over his whole body. 
He knew she was giving him the secret to 
guard and that a human destiny was hanging 
in the balance on his child’s lips. Filled with 
a jubilant pride that she reposed confidence 
in him he suddenly became possessed by a de- 
sire for self-sacrifice. He magnified his own 
wrong-doing in order to show how much of a 
man he had grown to be. Collecting his wits, 
he said: 

“No, no. There was no good reason for my 
running away. Mamma was very kind to me, 
but I didn’t behave myself, and I was 
ashamed, and so — and so I ran away.” 

The father looked at his son in amazement. 
Such a confession was the last thing he ex- 
pected to hear. His wrath was disarmed. 

“Well, if you’re sorry, then it’s all right, 
and we won’t say any more about it to-day. 
You’ll be careful in the future, though, not to 
do anything of the sort again.” He paused 
170 


The Last Dream 

and looked at Edgar, and his voice was milder 
as he went on. “How pale you are, boy! But 
I believe you’ve grown taller in this short 
while. I hope you won’t be guilty of such 
childish behavior again because really you’re 
not a child any more, and you ought to be sen- 
sible.” 

Edgar, the whole time, had kept looking at 
his mother. Something peculiar seemed to be 
glowing in her eyes, or was it the reflection of 
the light? No, it was something new, her 
eyes were moist, and there was a smile on her 
lips that said “Thank you” to him. 

They sent him to bed, but he was not now 
distressed at being left alone. He had such a 
wealth of things to think over. All the agony 
of the past days was dissipated by the tremen- 
dous sense of his first experience of life. He 
felt happy in a mysterious presentiment of 
future experiences. Outside, the trees were 
rustling in the gloomy night, but he was not 
171 


The Burning Secret 

scared. He had lost all impatience at having 
to wait for life now that he knew how rich it 
was. For the first time that day, it seemed to 
him, he had seen life naked, no longer veiled 
behind the thousand lies of childhood he saw 
it in its complete, fearful, voluptuous beauty. 
Never had he supposed that days could be 
crowded so full of transitions from sorrow to 
joy and back again, and it made him happy to 
think there were many more such days in store 
for him and that a whole life was waiting to 
reveal its mystery to him. A first inkling had 
come to him of the diversity of life. For the 
first time, he thought, he understood men’s 
beings, that they heeded each other even 
when they seemed to be inimical, and that it 
was very sweet to be loved by them. He was 
incapable of thinking of anything or anybody 
with hate. He regretted nothing and had a 
sense of gratitude even to the baron, his bit- 
terest enemy, because it was he who had 
172 


The hast Dream 

opened the door for him to this world of 
dawning emotions. 

It was very sweet to be lying in the dark 
thinking thoughts that were mingled vaguely 
with dreams and were lapsing almost into 
sleep. 

Was it a dream or did Edgar really hear the 
door open and someone creep softly into his 
room? He was too sleepy to open his eyes and 
look. Then he felt a breath upon his face and 
the touch of another face, soft and warm and 
gentle, against his, and he knew it was his 
mother who was kissing him and stroking his 
hair. He felt her kisses and her tears, and re- 
sponded to her caresses. He took them as 
reconciliation and gratitude for his silence. 
It was not until many years later that he 
really understood these silent tears and knew 
they were a vow, of this woman verging on 
middle age, to dedicate herself henceforth 
to her child and renounce adventure and all 


i73 


The Burning Secret 


desire on her own behalf. They were a fare- 
well. He did not know that she was thanking 
him for more than his silence. She was grate- 
ful that he had rescued her from a barren ex- 
perience, and in these caresses was bequeathing 
him the bitter-sweet legacy of her love for his 
future life. Nothing of all this did the child 
lying there comprehend, but he felt it was 
blissful to be so loved and that by this love he 
was already entangled in the great secret of 
the world. 

When she had withdrawn her hand from his 
head and her lips from his lips, and with a 
light swish of her skirts had left the room, 
something warm remained behind, a breath 
upon Edgar’s mouth. And a seductive long- 
ing came upon him to feel such soft lips upon 
his and to be so tenderly embraced often and 
often again. 

But this divination of the great secret, so 
longed for, was already clouded over by sleep. 
i74 


The Last Dream 

Once again all the happenings of the past 
houTS flitted through Edgar’s mind, once again 
the leaves in the book of his childhood were 
turned alluringly, then the child fell asleep, 
and the profounder dream of his life began. 


i75 










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